(The HPMOR discussion thread after this one is here.)
The previous thread is over the 500-comment threshold, so let's start a new Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread. This is the place to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic and anything related to it. The latest chapter as of 09/09/2011 is Ch. 77.
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: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. The fanfiction.net author page is the central location for information about updates and links to HPMOR-related goodies, and AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
Has it occurred to anyone else how good magic would be for psychological experimentation?
To start with, imagine you get the consent of your subjects to be Obliviated. Then, you can try exposing the subjects to differing stimuli while they're in exactly the same starting state, and you can precisely and easily measure the effect of whatever change you've made.
Even better, imagine the marketing opportunities. Think of Mr Hat and Cloak's dictionary attack, but with a focus group, and different advertisements for your new product. Show them the ad, then ask them how much they liked it, then Obliviate them again.
Also, you could try to remove the effect of priming on yourself with self-targeted obliviation.
And you could go on 4chan, knowing that what has been seen actually can be unseen, leaving you with only a note saying "Don't look at SqueeHorse" or something.
I really want magic.
I wonder if there's a different attitude toward spoilers or "great works of art" in the Wizarding World because of memory charms. Hats which could charm endings or plots out of people's minds, people who would only read one book over and over again by repeatedly blasting it out of their heads, or museums/theme parks Obliviating any previous experience there so that every time is fresh.
Would also like to see Eliezer lampshade the Snape kills Dumbledore spoiler by having everyone present self obliviate or something similar.
Is this an actual problem rather than just people making a show of how strongly they are disgusted by expressing the wish to unsee, asking for brain bleach etc?
I have an idea for an epic maneuver that a wizard could perform as a last resort in certain emergency situations. A severely wounded wizard could, if there is something of much greater utility then his own life on the line, transfigure himself into a healthy version of himself in order to continue the fight. This would be a death sentence, but still worth it if the stakes were high enough.
Then again Harry can already sustain a small transfigured object even in his sleep. Perhaps the most powerful of wizards could sustain a transfiguration on their own body indefinitely. Or... Professor McGonagall said that it would be possible for a child to transfigure themselves into an adult bodily form. Perhaps if the wizard could not sustain an object the size of their own body indefinitely after the emergency situation has passed they could again transfigure themselves into a adolescent, child, or midget form in order to achieve a body with a volume that they could sustain. Unless doing another transfiguration would cause the consequences of the previous transfiguration to be imposed on the new form. Though I don't see why that would necessarily be the case.
This would be a very fragile sort of existence. They would be much weaker due to the constant drain on their magic and incapacitation or anything that dispels the transfiguration would result in death.
It's also been noted that trolls are constantly transfiguring themselves into themselves, which lays a pretty good precedent for this kind of transfiguration!
Ok. I really don't like the new omake with the ponies.
I understand that Eliezer is trying to criticize overemphasis on peer review. But the bottom line is that peer review is really important: groups of humans who look at something critically are much more likely to notice mistakes and flaws then one will notice by one's self. This is not a trivial point.
I dislike it but not for that reason. There are so many great hooks for rationalist lessons in the actual show, but instead he makes an anvilicious alternate universe to take a cheap shot at a completely unrelated subject. It's such a waste. I am disappointed.
Indeed, when I sat down to make a rationalist MLP fanfic, I realized that the only part of the show that I would change is possibly Feeling Pinkie Keen.
In related news, remember the advice that keeping a diary increases happiness? Guess how I'm writing mine. :3
(In my planned fanfic, "Friendship is Natural Philosophy," it turns out that heliocentrism is true, and Princess Celestia has just been pretending to raise the sun in order to maintain her grip on power.)
Uh, I'm pretty sure Slytherin has halfbloods either way. Cause, you know, Snape.
And Riddle...
I beg your pardon. Check Ch. 30 and you should see some non-canonical first-year student cameos in Draco's army. For, may I mention, exactly that reason - I was explicitly familiar with the dilemma of the discordant Rowling statements and decided to resolve in favor of Hogwarts having around a thousand students, so that having around half the students sign up for the armies would give you 72 first-year soldiers.
Erm, I'd guess what gave my brain the idea originally was the fact that in canon they are flying corpses in grave shrouds.
It's been awhile since the last update, so here's a scene from the HPMOR in my head.
Hermione offers Harry a Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Bean, warning him that when they say "every flavour" they mean every flavour. The first one that Harry eats is booger-flavoured, and he gets frustrated about the foolish candy-makers, complaining that of all the flavours that he could've gotten, his first bean tasted like boogers. Hermione reminds him that it says "every flavour", so he shouldn't be surprised if it ended up tasting like something nasty. Harry has Hermione list flavours of Bertie Bott's beans that she has eaten, and then goes on a rant:
Out of all possible flavours, every single flavour that Hermione has mentioned is recognizable as something regularly found on or in the human body, and the majority are types of food. Harry tries to explain the concept of flavourspace - the entire set of all possible flavours - and what a skewed understanding of flavourspace wizards must have if "every flavour" beans only draw from the tiny proportion of flavourspace which they already regularly taste. So, yes, he should be surprised that the first bean he ate, which could have taken on any flavour in the vast universe of flavourspace, tasted like something that normally grows just inches from one's taste buds.
Which MY head continues: The nature of magic turned out to be sensitive to that kind of notion, and the flavours not predetermined, so the very next one tastes like dementor or strangelet.
Or the Latin language was partially based on a the AI's command language.
From Applause Lights: "I think it means that you have said the word "democracy", so the audience is supposed to cheer. It's not so much a propositional statement, as the equivalent of the "Applause" light that tells a studio audience when to clap."
I think that depending on what you mean by "The Right Thing" (whether you mean it mockingly or actually), you're right or wrong in your understanding of what applause lights means. But either way: the point of "applause lights" is that it's more of a signal for mutual self-congratulation than something with actual meaning/content.
e.g. "God bless the United States of America".
Ugh. Seriously? You probably didn't mean this as bad as it sounded, but it effectively looks as you're saying he was wrong in correcting you not because he was actually wrong, but because he shouldn't correct people with higher status (as marked by karma points).
That's a really really bad attitude to have.
Chapter 14:
If this sort of time-stretching effect could be controlled, it would be incredibly useful. One could research and prepare at leisure for an imminent attack, at a much better speedup than the mere 25% offered by Time-Turners. If it can go the other way as well, Salazar Slytherin might very well still be alive somewhere in Hogwarts.
The problem with encouraging LessWrongians to read your fanfic is that they spot the logical flaws in and/or ways to manipulate everything you describe. It's why I love this website.
Yes, but... just for the sake of argument...
Flamel is an inventor. And when assigning confidence in statements he makes about Philosopher's Stones, you need to bear in mind that he's the only inventor dumb enough to get caught. Anyone who independently invented it before him (or after) managed to keep it secret, that's all.
Or maybe there's more than one way to create a Philosopher's Stone and Flamel discovered the most difficult, so now he has an inflated idea of how hard it would be for someone else to duplicate his feat.
Or possibly Flamel is the Dread Pirate Roberts and there's no such thing as a Philosopher's Stone at all.
I'm not sure which explanation I like more, actually.
Real World Effects of SPHEW
Raemon has written at moderate length about feminist issues in HPMoR. In fact, this post is credited by Eliezer as
I don't wish to speculate about these issues because I don't feel I have the depth of knowledge needed to contribute meaningfully. However I do have a real life effect of SPHEW to report.
I produce the Methods of Rationality Podcast. For the most part it's a solo project, but after receiving a few requests I've gotten comfortable enough with it that I've decided to integrate other voices as long as it doesn't require much additional work from me. Meaning - just send me the audio file of you reading the lines and I'll incorporate it if I can. I didn't really expect much response from this approach, and for the most part I didn't get one. Seems no one is really interested in doing Gregory Goyle's lines. :)
With a notable exception. The girls of SPHEW. I received a complete reading of all of Daphne's lines before I even announced I was willing to take other voices. It was one of the primary motivators for overturning my previous policy and saying I would acce... (read more)
While I was reading Harry Potter, I kept thinking that the House system was destructive, both in terms of making people impose restrictions on themselves, and creating deep divisions in the wizarding world. Hogwarts is in this sense the primary cause of both the previous and the coming wizard war.
In Eliezer's fiction, it's more apparent that the Hogwarts house system is a mindless, destructive mechanism set in motion hundreds of years ago that no one person can change or escape. Even Dumbledore couldn't abolish the house system; the political pressure would pop him out of Hogwarts like a cork from a champagne bottle.
I don't understand why Dumbledore can't maintain order among the students and protect them from each other, though... it seems to be within the powers of the Hogwarts faculty, if they set their minds to it.
Dumbledore and McGonagall's weaknesses are more apparent in Eliezer's fiction. Which would score realism points with me, except that the deconstruction of the perfect Dumbledore is balanced by the imagination of a perfect Harry.
Harry is far from perfect. He has his own glaring weaknesses. He's excessively clever (sometimes at the expense of wise or rational), his ego clouds his decisions, he is paranoid, incapable of relating to humans normally and shows disconcerting tendencies towards codependency.
It's based to the actual House system used in British boarding schools.
Wait... you don't attribute dark side Harry to Harry? Damn. They're the main parts I empathize with!
In the previous thread there was some discussion on Ch 76's obliviation powered dictionary attack on Hermione. Most of that discussion seems to have assumed that what we saw between Hat And Cloak (HAC) and Hermione was simple to understand and relatively unskilllful... with Hermione's "tootsie pop" response being inane and HAC's probing appearing ham-handedly ignorant.
My impression was that we didn't see the first or second cycle of relatively normal behavior for either character, but more like the 7th cycle (12 minutes per cycle for 90 minutes?), where HAC was doing something radically different each time to probe Hermione's knowledge, feelings, etc in different ways, probably using legilimency. She was exhausted, like someone "in the box" with the police, except more stressful due to not even knowing she's in the box. And the questions don't have to be subtle, they just have to make her think of useful things while her eyes are visible. I don't think she was the ultimate target either, but rather she is the closest non-occlumens to Harry other than possibly Draco, so mind raping her to learn about Harry is "safer" even if it demonstrates horrifyi... (read more)
I would guess that Hat-and-Cloak probably wasn't using leglimency, or it wouldn't have needed Hermione to say that she found the mysterious getup suspicious.
I'm not sure how it worked in canon (and would expect semi-random behavior given Rowling's tendency to fudge world building details that a more mechanistic thinker might nail down) but in MoR it appears that legilimency allows the reader to perceive the "conscious surface thoughts" of the readee, plus the feeling of active reading (used by an occlumens to race ahead and put fake conscious surface thoughts in the way), plus the traces of past reading.
When Albus read Harry early in the story to look for traces he asked Harry what Harry had recently eaten so as to prevent himself from reading anything private in Harry's mind. If words can be used to redirect attention to banal issues so that it is impossible for even Albus to see more deeply, it stands to reason (to me anyway) that visibility is relatively shallow and that words could also be used to redirect attention towards the sensitive issues. So, HAC using legilimency probably couldn't get a verbal reason for lack of trust without a probe to raise "trust of HAC" in Hermione's mind, but once raised he would have been able to tell if she lied or detect any reasons that jumped into her mind that she didn't say... (read more)
Even assuming those are the limits of leglimency, I think that "this guy seems really suspicious" would be pretty near the surface of Hermione's thoughts without any additional prompting.
the occlumency trainer harry hires is able to read deeply within harry's mind without a lot of trouble. I think thoughts are probably easier or harder to read based on how surface they are. Dumbledore made them think of something else so he wouldn't accidentally read anything private because of how EASY it is to read surface memories, not because thinking of something else prevents being read entirely.
There seem to be two forms of leglimency, one that requires an explicit spell and a wand, and can be performed by most wizards. That's what Mr. Best in MoR uses, and what canon!Snape uses while trying to each Harry Occlumency. The victim knows what's going on, but usually can't do anything against it.
The second one is the form that Dumbledore (and canon!Voldemort), which just requires looking into the eyes of the victim, and lots of training. This is the "stealth mode", and most victims don't notice the intrusion at all.
It was always my intuitive understanding that the first form allows you to dig deep into one's memory, wheres the second form only shows you what the victim is thinking right now.
Does that make any sense?
Chapter 24: Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis: Act 2 ... The line of reasoning continued: Atlantis had been an isolated civilization that had somehow brought into being the Source of Magic, and told it to serve only people with the Atlantean genetic marker, the blood of Atlantis.
And by similar logic: The words a wizard spoke, the wand movements, those weren't complicated enough of themselves to build up the spell effects from scratch - not the way that the three billion base pairs of human DNA actually were complicated enough to build a human body from scratch, not the way that computer programs took up thousands of bytes of data.
So the words and wand movements were just triggers, levers pulled on some hidden and more complex machine. Buttons, not blueprints.
And just like a computer program wouldn't compile if you made a single spelling error, the Source of Magic wouldn't respond to you unless you cast your spells in exactly the right way.
The chain of logic was inexorable.
Under that hypothesis, accidental magic by wizarding children — otherwise without appreciable magic power, could be a Source of Magic initiated emergency "Help" spell.
I wonder whether the Tootsie Pop reference was a Leaning on the Fourth Wall hint to the readers or if we're meant to take that as Hermione subconsciously remembering what was going on? ("One hundred and eighty-seven. I tried it once." is kind of chilling, in that context.)
Or it could've been just a meaningless flippant remark, that too.
And 12 minutes per cycle? For the script given in the chapter, I'd peg it at more like 2 to 4.
Edit: Actually, I just though of a way to get an upper bound - the amount of adrenaline the human body can produce in 2-4 minutes is probably pretty sharply limited, right? Mr H&C presumably had to startle Hermione at the end of every cycle, so the physiological reaction would match up to the initial surprise and smooth over any discrepancies. I find it hard to imagine that "a rush of shock and fear hit her like a Stunning Hex over her whole body" more than five or so times without just leaving her burned out completely. (Not that she didn't seem pretty burned out by the end.)
And she can't be dead. For she is the bearer of a most marvelous destiny-
Actually I looked up in Wikipedia how many licks it takes to get the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop, and picked a number that seemed commensurate with the human-licker experiments.
The Chilling Implications you point out (how many licks does it take to get to the center of Hermione?) were totally lost on my consciousness until now. I wonder if that subconscious imagery had anything to do with why my brain produced that response from Hermione?
But still, probably not 187.
I'm sure there are other authors on fanfiction.net who could answer this for us.
Missed opportunity:
Edit: (Personally, I prefer " - she felt a momentary sense of disorientation - "; it seems a little more subtle, but I guess that's not the effect he's going for.)
It is more subtle and I do prefer it. The problem is that a substantial fraction of reviewers are still saying they've got no idea what's happening during the ellipses, and I care about that.
Your version is a little too unsubtle, but the fact that people were buying the "last descendant of Merlin thing" had me wondering what it would've taken to actually trigger their skepticism.
"For you, my Lady, are the last descendant of Cthulhu -"
"For you alone must stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness -"
"Only you can prevent forest fires -"
No, I get why you changed it, and I certainly wasn't offering that as any kind of serious suggestion, but... well, maybe it's elitist of me, but frankly I don't understand what benefit there is to catering to the lowest common denominator of ffnet readers. I mean, the lowest common denominator of ffnet readers is pretty low. (Boy-Who-Lived Gets Draco Malfoy Pregnant! sorry i suk at sumries lol, dont liek dont read)
On another note:
"For you, my Princess, are of the blood of the dragons -"
"You have the ability to overcome great fear -"
"By your powers combined, I am -"
"Yer a wizard, Hermione -"
(In hindsight, Giles felt it was a little embarrassing, how obvious the solution was.
After all, what teenage girl doesn't want to feel special?)
Euurghh the more I think about this the worse it gets
Sure Thing.
I think so. Eliezer needs to revise his chapter again.
I'd describe the "tootsie pop" response as contemptuous rather than inane.
Re Chp 35
I searched all the threads, and didn't find any mention of this. There's a hint in the conversation between Hat&Cloak and Zabini: namely, the fact that there is a conversation at all. Why does H&C need to talk to Zabini if he's just going to obliviate him anyway? Here's one possible answer: he needs some information from Zabini.
I don't think he needs Zabini's report on the conversation — partly because he keeps talking afterwards, and partly because there are independent reasons to think that H&C is either Quirrel or an agent of Quirrel's. (For instance, the "keyed into the wards" comment, as well as the fact that H&C exactly predicts Quirrel's reaction to Zabini's statement, and the fact that this statement ended up benefiting Quirrel.)
So what information does H&C need? Note that he tells Zabini, "The reward I promised you is already on its way to your mother, by owl." In other words, Zabini was clever enough to insist that his reward go to a third party, leaving someone around to remember that he's owed an award in case he's obliviated. H&C seems to me to be turning the conversation at every step towards Zabini's mother. Eventu... (read more)
No: it was there, he just spelled it Fox News.
The next line after "If you didn't tell her at all what the spell was supposed to do, it would stop working." says
Knowing that the spell is 'For enemies' apparently counts as knowing in very vague terms what it will do.
An idle bit of speculation, which has probably been brought up before, but it occurred to me that MoR Voldemort, being more intelligent than his canonical counterpart, may not have seen fit to stop at a mere 7 horcruxes. Why not simply make as many as (in)humanly possible, rather than adhering to some superstitious wishy-washy stuff about "7 is a powerfully magic number"? It is almost certain that the mechanics of horcrux-construction in MoR are different from those in canon (e.g. mind-upload rather than soul-splitting), so perhaps the limit that Canon!Voldemort faced (unstable soul-fragments) is not something that would be encountered in quite the same form as MoR!Voldemort.
To provide the merest scrap of substance to my speculation, I noticed that in Chapter 53 (TSPE, Part III), Quirrell states:
The bolded interests me, partly because of something Dumbledore states in Chapter 61 (TSPE, Part XI):
... (read more)What the? I'm downgrading from your "Harry represents an AI" to "Harry represents an AI creator" and now you want to get technical and say "there is no AI in the story"?
I believe Eliezer would rather dip his... arm... in a vat of acid than suggest to his readers that an AI will act like a clever well intentioned child that learns valuable moral lessons through social interactions with those he loves, over a long period of a slow, rather inefficient quest for power.
Chapter 76: "And that's why I can destroy Dementors and you can't," said the boy. "Because I believe that the darkness can be broken."
This is interesting, because it touches upon a thought I had about the Dementors back in Chapter 45. In canon, Dementors are manifestations not of death or even fear, but of despair. (I believe Rowling has said she drew upon her own experiences of depression.) That's why chocolate helps, why they generate feelings of hopelessness, why they take away happy memories and leave unhappy ones, and why their ultimate power is to put people into a coma rather than to kill them. None of this makes sense for a manifestation of death.
But Harry's response would work either way. A happy memory, a pleasant thought, can shield against despair, but it can't destroy it. Hope, on the other hand, true grim hope – the belief that things can be made better and, crucially, the unshakeable determination to make them so, not by thinking 'wouldn't it be nice if…' but by knuckling down and solving the insoluble problem – is the only true cure for despair. And that sort of hope, which Harry shows, is actually pretty hard to hold truly, which would explain w... (read more)
I think what Harry says is heartfelt, but it's also a decent false trail to prevent Dumbledore from accidentally working out the secret and losing his ability to cast a Patronus.
Not that Dumbledore necessarily needs that. He's in a great position for doublethink: he can presumably use the Pensieve, label the memory "the secret of dementors and the Patronus charm," then Obliviate himself. Locking the basilisk away in a secret chamber, if you will.
Blocking the Unblockable Curse.
This is mostly related to canon, but also a bit to HPMoR.
I've always wondered why the killing curse counts as "unblockable". In "Order of the Phoenix", Dumbledore blocks it by moving a statue in its path. Seems to work nicely. There is other evidence that solids stop the killing curse -- if it went through it, you could accidentally kill somebody behind a wall when missing your target. Prof. Moody would surely have mentioned that danger when talking about the killing curse, if that was the case. So you could carry around a steel plate strong enough to block the curse, and quickly move it into its path. Not easy, but possible.
There are also several instances where simple spells conjure animals (I remember bats and small birds). I wonder if you could simply conjure an animal into the way of the killing curse. It might need to have a minimal size to work, but a powerful wizards should be able to do that.
I also wonder if there are ways to combine charms: one detection charm that triggers another one. For example one that detects killing curses, and enables apparation or a portkey.
So, one proven way to block a killing curse, one conjectural, and another conjectural way to escape it. I can't believe the wizards still call it "unblockable" :-)
*Meow*
I... guess...
You know, it occurs to me that out of such renowned experts as Dumbledore, Trelawney, that unnamed Bavarian seer, the Unspeakables, and the centaurs...
I kinda want to know what Luna Lovegood thinks about prophecy before I decide what to believe.
I've been searching a bit, but didn't find any "process" for translation of HP:MoR. Being a native french, I can offer a bit of my time to translate part of it, but :
I would like to know what's the standard process, since a translation can at some points alter the meaning, is there any review or agreement from Eliezer required ?
There seems to be two french translations already started. I don't want to conflict with other persons. Are the current translators still active ? If so, do they require help, or do they prefer to work alone ?
Do you think it would be a good idea to setup a discussion on LW or a wiki page about translation in general, with the process, the status of the current translations (if the translator(s) are still active or not, ...) ?
Well I am in HMPOR withdrawal so I will post an idea that I have about the origin of the "unverbalizable fear" that Harry has while under the sorting hat about going to Hufflepuff where he will be happy. This idea is based on the few descriptions of the relationship between harry and his father in the early chapters
I was going to post the excerpts in this comment, but it is quite a bit of content so I will abstain for now. If someone wants me to post the excerpts I will. For now suffice it to say that Harry does not feel respected by his father and the only positive feeling that his father is said to display towards Harry is pride.
You might say that his father dropping everything for a last minute book buying spree was a very kind thing to do. Indeed Harry himself says that his dad is "awesome" because he buys him books, and uses the memory later when trying to cast the patronius charm. However, considering the lack of respect and affection that Harry's father shows I have to ask if the book buying spree was really for Harry. It seems more likely to be a... (read more)
This is heading straight into mindkiller territory, but there's a style of reading which involves tracking everything that might be offensive in a story. The thing is, sometimes what looks like reasonable deductions of background beliefs is a result, but it's a hell of a way to treat fiction as a matter of habit.
I find myself wondering about the supposed safety of Hogwarts. The wards are given as an explanation for this but if students are able to constantly hex each other in the halls, Quirrel is able to cast extremely powerful spells, and an unnamed 6th year replicated the Sectumsempra incident from cannon without any apparent interference from the wards I cant imagine what it is exactly that the wards are supposed to do to insure the safety of the students.
Consider that the school is full of 11-18 year olds with access to weapons of mass destruction and it seems to me that the apparent safety of the place for the past 50 years is due to luck rather then anything inherent in system.
Perhaps luck is inherent in the system. The canon storyline does include a literal luck potion, so similar things are plausible. They also have and use a seer, and short-range time travel. The latter two could be used in ways that prevent deaths without a corresponding reduction in close calls.
The problem is, Dumbledore's not going to tell Harry what the condition is for getting the stone. Why would he? He didn't tell canon Quirrell, who was standing there trying to figure out why he couldn't get it. He didn't even tell canon Harry until after the fact. The mirror as a screening process works even better if the person being screened doesn't know what it's testing for, and thus can't fake it.
And Harry would want to use the stone, make no mistake. The first thing he'd do with it is make himself immortal, to make sure no accident or fluke could stop him from having time to mass produce the immortality elixir. And he'd be using it for study anyways. But the most important part is that even if he is capable of precommitting and one-boxing, and even if that kind of trick fools the mirror, he'd first need to know that that was the condition necessary to obtain the stone. And you can probably count the number of people Dumbledore trusts with that information on one hand.
I think that the new information 78 would give us to discuss ought to balance out the cliffhanger, no matter how large.
Also, I wonder if Harry might use the Headmasters conclusions about the return of the Dark Lord to request private lessons. Most likely not Horcrux-related lessons, but similiar to what Ron and Hermione expected Dumbledore to teach him in Canon. In this universe Love is certainly not Harry's Deus ex Machina, so Dumbledore ought to want him to be more competent in Battle Magic.
In canon, they can--Harry spends much of the sixth book exploring memories from many different people, all in the same pensieve. In MoR, Draco says "we" have a pensieve, implying there's a Malfoy Pensieve, where an "I" would imply that his and his dad's are separate.
I've been reading a chapter of MoR to my girlfriend every time we go to a park, and we just got up to Chapter 39. Two thoughts:
It's fun to try to imitate a long series of random noises with your mouth alone in a public place.
Sarah's immediate reaction to the first part was "Why doesn't he just ask Harry for a Pensieve memory of his conversation with Lucius? Dumbledore doesn't use notes." I can't see why not either. My first reaction was that Pensieves haven't been referenced in MoR yet and might work differently, but I was wrong; Draco's going to use his memory of Harry's first date to blackmail him.
No.
I was just wondering: does anyone else hope Eliezer fleshes out Magical History? I find it a pity that we don't get to see how Magical Britain became what it is now. I mean, so far he's reflected (very broadly) on the current political situation through Draco, but he's continued to keep us in the dark about Voldemort's rise to power, the situation that led to that, the circumstances surrounding the beginning of magic (as a technology, since Harry has confirmed that the rules for spells aren't natural laws), the founding of Hogwarts ...
So, which do you all think are most important for Eliezer to touch upon? Can you think of any others you want to see?
Also: I know that wizards generally ignore muggles, but they are another entire civilization, with documentation of their history, living in secret right next to the Muggle society. Wizarding history could provide a lot of insight into Muggle history because of how the two are so closely related.
It's mentioned, just not dwelled on. It's mentioned once in passing in each of the first two books:
Sorceror's Stone:
Chamber of Secrets:
And so on. It's just that I don't think anything interesting ever happens during them.
I'm interested in discussing the world Eliezer has created. Its alternate in obvious and subtle ways. Obviously, in this world both Harry and Quirrelmort are rationalists, but lots of other elements have changed.
-Dumbledore seems more changed by war than his book incarnation, to the point where he is making some obviously bad choices that have impacts on the school -The school is a more dangerous place than it was in the books. By this, I mean that in books 1-4, despite some hijinks, the actual danger was pretty darn low- in first year Harry had to actively try to get into mortal danger (ignoring some deeply unsubtle assasination attempts by Quirrel). In particular other students are never a danger to each other, yet theres a strong implication that here fights really can escalate- or at least that was the attempt with the Heromione arc. This is probably due in part to Dumbledore's approach (I don't believe that the 'Dore of the books would have tolerated such an escalation at all), and the beefing up of Slytherin house, and the Malfoy's in particular. While Lucius Malfoy was clearly a powerful individual in the books, his manipulations were fairly clunky, and nowhere near as subtle as portrayed here.
I think I need to have it in my head that many of the characters are subtly different here, because sometimes I read their portrayal as mocking the attitude in the books, and while sometimes that IS whats happening, sometimes its just because the characters aren't quite the same.
We assume he's competent because Dumbledore keeps referring to him as competent, but Dumbledore does have a motive to exaggerate his enemy's power. He constantly uses Lucius as an excuse to not do something, and he flat out tells Harry early on that weakening Dumbledore strengthens Malfoy.
But Malfoy is in over his head. Every time we see or hear from him, he's getting something wrong, being ineffectual, or being publicly humiliated. By contrast, he seems pretty darn effective in the books. His scheme in Chamber of Secrets was simple and robust enough to work, and even with Harry repeatedly being in the right place at the right time it still ends with the Weasleys discredited and the Malfoys untouched. (Edit: Sorry, misremembered. He goes after Dumbledore prematurely and loses. Good scheme apart from that, though.)
His main obvious difference from canon is the way he's raised his son.
Hm. Quoted in the linked post is the fact that Dumbledore's suggested revision to the Potion of Eagle's Splendor (the one that would end up making the imbiber sick for weeks, as happened to Petunia) was, specifically, replacing blueberries with Thestral blood. Now where else has that come up recently?
Considering that by the time he annotated Lily's book, Dumbledore had certainly had around thirty years to study the Elder Wand (which canonically has a Thestral tail-hair core), and may or may not have already examined the Cloak of Invisibility as well, this certainly seems suggestive of something. I've no idea what, though. ("Charming as death" doesn't seem like much of a compliment.)
One does not simply timetravel into MoRdore's office.
I think he'll probably work it out exactly three hours later, when Professor McGonagall shows up outside his door.
The point as I understand it was to have the humans not have exactly our moral system. Morals evolve over time, and most people in any given generation would be shocked by the ethical and moral attitudes of people a few generations down the line. This attitude of the population reflects that. It also helps broaden the scope of the questions raised by not making one of the moral systems identical to our general moral system, so we don't immediately look at the morality of the humans and just say "but that's the right system!"
Overall, while I think I understand why Eliezer did this, it seems to be a very tiny benefit for a very large distraction. Overall, a net negative in getting his points across.
I don't think you get it. If you think you can substitute "write something slightly at odds with his beliefs into a fanfiction" even remotely appropriately into that context then you do not have enough knowledge about Eliezer's publicly expressed goals to be making the kind of moral judgement you presume to make.
I wrote my claim because it sounds like a hyperbole but isn't. For the right value of 'acid' my ... (read more)
Er, except that link never actually claimed that 'fact', or any of the others, to be canon. "Head canon" is a term for "things that I pretend are true but have no basis in reality". (It's only canon in your head, geddit?)
I'm not sure someone in a good story would recognize that they are in a story even when it is highly optimized. From the reader's perspective Harry might be interesting but even from his perspective he's spent days in classes, he's spent hours listening to Professor Binns drone on, he's had to do tedious homework, and he's had 11 years where he was just like a lot of other very smart kids, many of whom beat him in math contests.
There's certainly evidence pointing that way: "the sibilant whisper" - "dry as dust" - "the high-pitched chuckle" , "What's your name?" "That is the riddle, young Ravenclaw" , and indeed "for now you have seen how the others stayed silent"...
But while I could easily believe that Jeremy Jaffe is better at projecting false emotion than Hermione is at discerning it, I have a much harder time believing that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, whose eyes blazed crimson like miniature suns, could forget the value of surface appearances.
Whoah, whoah. Wait. Back up.
What the heck?
As to the second: the whole point of having it at Hogwarts to begin with was as bait for a trap, right? If everyone believes it's real, it serves just as well for that purpose as if it actually were real. Even if Dumbledore knew it was a fake, he would still have every reason to guard it to the best of his ability.
As to the first... what makes you think he hasn't?
Tom Riddle, who became Voldemort, is the one who added to his list of rules
Are time-turners really not turing computable? Is Harry ever going to figure out what allows magic to (seem to?) break the laws of physics? Is "we're living in a simulation" eliminated as a possibility?
Just reread chapter 40.
Sounds to me like Quirrell had never heard of the resurrection stone before this conversation. Later in the chapter, it becomes apparent that he has never hear... (read more)
Cross posting what I wrote on TV Tropes
'm pretty sure i've figured out quirrelmorts plan for harry and magical britian. To TLDR it for you guys, hes going to train harry as a caesar, and use harry as a figurehead/puppet to force magical britian into a war of conquest with the rest of the magical world, probably selling it as a world wide war on dark wizards. Then once england owns the wizard world, they own the entire world since you can't fight invisible mind rapers.
Viewed in this context all of his actions start making sense. Harry is a very well known f... (read more)
I know what they did and it shall be revealed.
Chp 78 ---
Eliezer, given all the waiting, and that Chp 78 is 17K words, can we have a NY gift of Chp 78 in 3 parts? 5K each spaced about a week apart? That should take us till the third week of Jan :)
From an addict's perspective, drip helps :)
Another possibility consistent with AA's idea is that the AI was created for the use of, rather than created by, the Neanderthals. Admittedly I'm now going down the AI-Designer-Of-The-Gaps rabbit hole, which suggests this line of reasoning is best discarded quickly.
We've never actually seen Harry deal with a real, deadly enemy before. When he pledges to take someone as his enemy, in the formal way he did when Malfoy told him about Narcissa, I think what he's talking about goes beyond the level of schoolyard bullies and annoying reporters.
No he doesn't. He's just an AI creator. If he was representing an AI the entire story would have been over at Chapter 1.
Eliezer would not write a parable in which an AI made a slow journey to power, on the way learning valuable moral lessons through social interaction with the people he cares about. That completely undermines all that he stands for.
Harry destroying the world would make a reasonabl... (read more)
I'm not convinced of your second point. Powerful MoR wizards aren't nearly as constrained as people in our world, but the only person in the story that's explicitly trying to act as a optimizer over a generalized utility function rather than to achieve some set of concrete goals -- that is, the only person acting as Eliezer's concept of AI would -- is Harry himself. There are a number of ways that plot thread could be resolved, but destroying the world as we know it isn't the one I'd bet on -- although I'd expect the threat of such destruction to come in... (read more)
Eliezer has already mentioned things like Atlantis. History would probably play a role in finding out how magic works in general. Harry, from a political perspective, would do well to learn how the situation arose, and it may be an opportunity for Eliezer to set up an Aesop.
And it wouldn't necessarily change history. The muggle world as it is in canon is very similar to how it is in the real world, down to things like Playstations, yet Rowling invents a wizarding history that manages to not change much. All of the science Eliezer has mentioned is historic... (read more)
Um, what? Description from Prisoner of Azkaban, emphasis mine:
Nowhere does it say that they are green. The best description I can think of is "flying corpses that hide their appearances," which works pretty well as a symbol of Death.
Eliezer is now recommending specific readings for the "Know everything Harry does!" quest instead of handwaving it with "eh, just study every single thing I wrote after 2005 and you'll be a much bigger threat than Harry."
I've gotta say I appreciate this, all the more because it's probably tedious work.
In short, エリエザー様万歳！
And as long as we're trying to find magical exploits, I wonder what Harry would do if he got his hands on some Felix Felicis.
For instance, if he locked himself in a room with only a weegie board (or scrabble tiles), would it be forced to spell out whatever information he needed to know? Would it only answer his direct questions, or could it just start warning him about all of Quirrell and Dumbledore and Lucius' plans and how to beat them?
Is it possible to get Dementors to play poker with you by strongly expecting that behaviour?
"A rationalist!hero should excel by thinking - moreover, thinking in understandable patterns that readers can, in principle, adopt for themselves." - Eliezer
I think Harry is supposed to be a rationalist!hero. I think he's supposed to succeed in the end. The fact that he also has the potential to be very dangerous and destructive is, I think, just about the dangers of power itself, and the importance of ethics + reason in making decisions. Especially when you have something to protect.
I think Harry's ethics are actually not too far from EY's. Of c... (read more)
I think it also sort of implies that Eliezer has a coherent metaphysics going on behind the scenes. The decision theoretic generalization of anthropic selection, reifcation of good story selection effects like conservation of detail or whatchamacallit from tvtropes, things like that. I heard that he once wrote a story about time machines? Or at least one about "outcome pumps". I wouldn't be surprised if he reuses his cleverest ideas from there in HP:MoR.
One question about theology, miracles, and Newcomblike problems that intrigues me:
If I was in... (read more)
You won't think of it. You just won't discover you're in a fanfic! The laws of physics are running on an author, and that author doesn't want you to discover you're in a fanfic. I expect you will have trouble thinking thoughts physics itself does not want you to think.
I hate be the one to break this to you, Will, but... you can't do magic. I'm sorry.
Despair? I thought JKR mentioned depression, not despair. And the dementors are grey, not green.
And JKR's own experience with depression was after the death of her mother -- so the "death causes depression" is similar in content to "Dementor destroys all positive emotions". There's no reason why JKR couldn't use imagery of death in combination with her emotion.
In the books, an afterlife exists. But the soul-destruction, the true death, is what the Dementor seems to cause. Again -- if JKR's mother had just died, her most depressed thoughts about it would be the ones that involved thinking about the true death of soul-annihilation (the Dementor's kiss), not an afterlife.
Green? No. From the American edition of PoA:
And for the first appearance of a dementor Rowling talks about drowning. I don't know about the skin over the eyes, but the rest of it explicitly points to death.
That's backwards. I suppose experiencing the death of someone close to you could leave a mental scar in the form of a bad memory. But that's hardly the definition of a bad memory. Nor is a painful memory an inevitable outcome of someone's death.
Does anyone else wonder why Sirus hasn't shown up in this story yet? I get the whole
But is it still an accepted fact in MoR verse that Pettigrew is innocent?
It's easily possible that Hermione has seen at least one picture of Sirius (she mentions him by name as the Potters' betrayer in Chapter 8), and given her memory it would be plausible for her to recognize him, even months afterward. Additionally, Sirius is one of the few people who would cause an immediate reaction of terror at first sight.
Another one might be - bear with me here - Lucius Malfoy. This idea is a little shakier, as it's less plausible that Hermione is familiar with his appearance, but the advantage is that it neatly accounts for the otherwise-strange
since Lucius seems to be convinced Harry is possessed by Voldemort. (Though it casts a certain odd light on Mr H&C's warning to Hermione about Lucius, I think it's at least possible that he could bite his tongue ... (read more)
I've already posted this in the reviews as well as on TvTropes, but I figure it can't hurt to share it here as well. (As well as pose it somewhat more formally.)
Harry's freak-out in the beginning over the animagus transformation got me thinking. Between the two possiblities: a) the laws of physics Harry believes are wrong and b) the animagus transformation only appears to violate Conservation but doesn't actually do so, it seems fallacious to skip to possibility-a without ruling out possibility-b.
After some thought, I was able to generate a hypothesis for ... (read more)
A hypothesis I'm currently toying with: Quirrell and HJPEV are different versions of the same individual, in some sense, and the Quirrell version is using some form of magic (probably involving breaking the 6-hour-limit on sending information backwards through time, possibly involving possession of a real Quirrell) to carry out a process of recursive self-improvement on himself. The story we're currently reading takes place in one iteration of the loop.
Has anyone posted this idea before on the net?
There are some serious problems with this hypothesis:
- Quir
... (read more)Sorry if this has been asked before, my meagre google-fu skills fail to reveal it.
Chapter 55. When Harry cast his Patronus in Azkaban, he lost some of his "life" to sustain it:
... (read more)Then allow me to step in as one of the foremost experts on the writings of Eliezer (self-proclaimed).
All that applause lights... (read more)
That would take effort he could be spending on coming up with in-story puzzles.
But yeah, scheduled progress updates would be spectacular. Even if he hasn't written anything, I'd rather know that than nothing.
A significant portion of my confidence regarding the Quirrell/Voldemort equivalence in HPMoR derives from sources outside the HPMoR text itself. I suspect the same is true of most people who share that POV.
And yes, I think it would be somewhat difficult on Harry's part to explain himself to the people who care about the person who did it; but in this case, Hermione of all people would pro... (read more)
Yes, especially considering that Harry already started to do this (when he made Draco admit that the death of Lily Potter was "sad"). When Draco learns that his father burned several other innocent women to death before Dumbledore/Bones returned the favor, he and Harry will both find themselves in difficult moral situations.
J.K. Rowling is releasing some character bios on Pottermore, and showing a flagrant disregard for MoR!canon. In particular, McGonagall's father was a Muggle Presbyterian minister. Even though, in MoR:
Furthermore, per the bio McGonagall was ten years old and still living in the Muggle world when atomic bombs were drop... (read more)
I think Eliezer shouldn't fuss too much making the MoR! universe consistent with any new information, especially not chapters already posted. Too much cost in time, too little benefit.
And a half-blood McGonnagal would need be drastically rewritten, it's not just those few passages, it's her entire attitude towards the Muggle world.
It seems to me that Minerva serves a useful narrative purpose primarily because she is a not-particularly-well-informed pureblood in Dumbledore's inner circle. Making her a half-blood alongside Snape... well, it reduces the opportunities for culture shock rather a lot. Who could be brought in to showcase the viewpoint of Light-sided purebloods, the Weasleys?
Not to mention I feel like Minerva would be a lot less sympathetic as a character if she weren't so consistently off-balance.
I was correcting your interpretation of my use of the phrase, not your use of it. (On further thought I could reword it "words whose practical meaning is 'applaud this statement'"; that might cover both.)
Not sure which you mean, but I know there's contradictory evidence to what I cited. I don't think I want to talk about the "reality" of the show, though, just possible fanfic interpretations. My belief about the show is that it'll continue to dance around the subject, and that the occasional slips will continue to contradict each other.
Can't tell if serious.
Well, these days college intake is fairly mixed up among different personalities and backgrounds. Taking Cambridge, most people jokingly hates St John's and think Homerton are less intelligent. The rivalries probably stemmed from some historical background though.
But really, just grouping people randomly is enough for some hostility. We only don't actually hate each other because we have to work together sometimes.
Dumbledore needs to say that Hogwarts has run out of water, and make the houses cooperate to get a new water supply.
I had been assuming that the third-floor corridor was just a way to keep young Gryffindors distracted. Surely even Dumbledore wouldn't be daft enough to entice the Dark Lord into a school. But Quirrell seems to think it's of interest. Confusing...
Random, low-confidence but possibly amusing prediction: in MoR the final obstacle of the third-floor corridor is called the Mirror of Vec, because it's inscribed Noiti lovde talopart xet nere hocru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi.
It's much more thematic, at least.
Great idea! I should do that.
Well, you know how it would actually play out, given Canon!Voldemort
"Okay, my wand didn't work against Harry, and a borrowed wand didn't work against Harry. What I need to do is get the ultimate wand!"
"Master, it may be impertinent of me, but why don't we just get you an AK-47 and let you shoot him? Or maybe a grenade launcher or something?"
"But then I won't have defeated him with magic! My magic must be the mightiest!"
"Um, wait, if you need the boost of the ultimate wand, isn't that already proof your magic on its own—"
"Avada kedavra! All right, anyone else have helpful suggestions?"
I dunno. Personally I haven't been able to look at chocolate milkshakes the same way for a while, and I used to actually like them, so that's a memory I would prefer buried. (But goatse was just mildly impressive, and lemonparty didn't even merit a twinge.) Probably everyone reacts differently to that sort of thing.
What do you think of memetic attacks, e.g. basilisks?
Edit: You know, if you downvoted me for being disgusting that means you agree with my premise. You should be downvoting FAWS, not me! (Not strictly serious.)
Typically, yes, even Hogsmeade is invisible to them. But I'm sure that there are ways to invite specific individuals (although I can't recall that it was ever done in the books).
One thing that I found interesting but that I haven't noticed anyone else mention.
In chapter 76, we have:
... (read more)During Hermione's description, my brain immediately pointed out that no one could possibly know whether or not Seers can give prophesies with no one around to hear them, because the Seers don't remember doing it and, well, there's no one else around to notice.
Maybe Seers are just constantly prophesying when they're alone and no one has any idea.
I don't think that would really settle the matter, though. All you would then know is whether seers prophesied when only in the presence of recording devices. (If a seer prophesied in the forest and no one was there to hear, would it constrain the future?) I wonder what you would call that, actually- the Cassandra Uncertainty Principle?
(This sort of goes along with all the other responses to the grandparent, but Donny's is the best fit):
I'm having a hard time believing that the girl who said this-
Is the same girl who said this-
Okay, say that prophecies are caused by 'pressure in Time' from great events that are 'trying' to happen. How could anyone know that? What's worse, though, is that she did this research with Harry, who apparently let her walk away believing this nonsense.
Edit: (And if Eliezer pops in to say the Department of Mysteries has a room full of Temporal Barometers I will be very unhappy.)
Voldemort is actually hundreds of years old and prefers to communicate with Malfoy's ancestor, Helga Hufflepuff's ghost?
We haven't seen anything of Madam Pince in MOR, have we? You'd think Harry would make a point to talk to the magical librarian. Come to think of it, she might be Hat and Cloak. Although not if H&C = Santa Clause.
Next Omake: The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy.
Chapter 17.
I know it's supposed to be a joke, but.... How? Is Dumbledore monitoring every wizard and witch's sex life? And how did he manage to crunch that data? Do wizards have calculating machi... (read more)
Eh, it was probably a given from the start that it was counting something.
Then immediately after the French Ministry of Magic authorizes/legalizes a new "Give yourself multiple orgasms" charm, or even just a new magical Viagra, the device's count jumps up. At that point Dumbledore knows it's counting something that correlates strongly with sexual satisfaction, but the count is a bit too low to be counting the orgasms of the entire French female magical population. Turns out the inventor was a jealous French wizard who tried to keep tabs on his left-handed wife, but keyed in the criteria too weakly, so that any left-handed witch within the borders of France would do.
It seems that Akinator doesn't recognise any HPMOR characters.
This sounds like a job for a few procrastinators with a weekend to spare.
My own currently favored theory is:
U&P naq Dhveery ner qvssrerag vaqvivqhnyf ohg obgu unir n Ibyqrzbeg vzcevag. Guvf pnhfrf gurz gb or fvzvyne be vqragvpny va fbzr erfcrpgf naq qvssrerag va bguref.
"Status update, Jan 19 2012: Now working on Ch. 81. I think I'd really better finish at least Ch. 81 before posting Ch. 78, due to the number of backward edits I've been making, and the extent to which they form a dramatic unity that should be posted regularly/predictably after the first chapter hits."
Well, it's nice that we didn't need to ask for a progress update. About how long might 81 turn out to be?
Nope, in France "libéral" is closer to American "libertarian", i.e. pro-free markets, anti-welfare (as opposed to the "mainstream" right wing, which isn't particularly hostile to big government, and is more about traditional values and whatnot, and of course as opposed to the socialists and other left-wingers, who are very much at odds with the liberals). I think "liberal" has the same meaning in most of Europe (and in most of the... (read more)
Depends, it may very well make sense from a TDT/UDT point of view.
The bit where Eliezer isn't a character in a novel.
Sure UFAI pattern-matches to the Dune jihad better than anything in HPMoR, but even then Eliezer isn't acting like Paul at all. A Muad-dib!Eliezer would be working feverishly in the basement of the fortified SIAI bunker (which would actually be a cult) to put together an "at-least-it-isn't-paperclips-forever" AI before the US government finds his location and drops a bunker buster on him. Right about now we would have tense negotiations with national entities grimly ending in Eliezer pressing the On switch.
This sounds nothing like what is actually happening, does it?
The inexorable conclusion is that phoenixes are fueled... by evil!
Something I just noticed from Ch. 55:
Amelia Bones: "Someone would burn for this."
Did Amelia Bones burn Narcissa Malfoy?
Actually, I just had a chilling realization in regards to that. From chapter 62:
'"No," said the old wizard's voice. "I do not think so. The Death Eaters learned, toward the end of the war, not to attack the Order's families. And if Voldemort is now acting without his former companions, he still knows that it is I who make the decisions for now, and he knows that I would give him nothing for any threat to your family. I have taught him that I do not give in to blackmail, and so he will not try."
Harry turned back then, and saw a coldness on the old wizard's face to match the shift in his voice, Dumbledore's blue eyes grown hard as steel behind the glasses, it didn't match the person but it matched the formal black robes.'
I strongly suspect that Dumbledore burned Narcissa Malfoy so that the death eaters would stop targeting the families of Order members. Judging by his tone of voice and body language in this excerpt, this is probably the one action during the war that Dumbledore most regrets having had to do.
If I'm right, Harry will be in a difficult moral situation when he learns the truth. Was what Dumbledore did justified? On the one hand, torturing a mostly innocent person to death is deplorable no matter how you slice it. On the other, if that was the only way to stop many other innocents from being tortured to death...
It occurs to me that a Pensieve would be a powerful tool for dealing with any of the Newcomblike problems that have come up so far or are likely to come up in the future -- getting past the magic mirror, for example. Just extract any memories relating to debiasing that you might have, put them in a jar labeled do not open until Christmas, and go talk to whatever the Omega of the moment is.
Might not work like that in practice -- I wouldn't expect it to IRL, at least, since scrubbing a memory probably wouldn't get rid of the weightings that have grown aroun... (read more)
Well, these traditions somehow propagated before the internet.
For whatever reason, I didn't make this connection until now.
Prediction about Quidditch and the House Cup:
Dhveery znavchyngrf Enirapynj naq Fylgureva gb fpber whfg gur evtug ahzore bs cbvagf va gur svany tnzr gb znxr gur Ubhfr Phc n gvr. Guvf vf znqr cbffvoyr ol gur tnzr raqvat ng n cerqrsvarq gvzr.
Caveat:
Gur Ubhfr Phc vf njneqrq ng gur raq bs gur fpubby lrne, juvpu vf cebonoyl abg vzzrqvngryl nsgre gur ynfg Dhvqqvgpu tnzr. Nf jryy, vs Fylgureva naq Enirapynj unir hardhny fpberf orsber tbvat vagb gur tnzr, boivbhfyl n gvr vf gur jebat erfhyg.
Eliezer added a new omake to chapter 64 which involves a rationalist version of My Little Pony.
What makes you think that phoenices are asexual, exactly?
A bishonen is an androgynous-looking pretty male in Japanese anime. mpreg is short for male pregnancy.
The bit I'm referencing is from Chapter 28:
Now, try to imagine Chapter28!Harry - after learning to lose, but before going to Azkaban and reconciling with his dark side - attaining "godhood in a single shot". How well do you imagine that might have wor... (read more)
I tried putting the HTML for MoR on an eReader, and the paragraph breaks disappeared, making the story seem like the hectic ravings of a madman on speed.
Some of the paragraph breaks are rendered by the Kobo eReader as paragraph breaks. But looking at the HTML, I can't figure out what the rule is. Does anyone know?
(P.S. - Do not buy a Kobo eReader.)
A) Lemon party, not lemon faces.
B) You are way too trusting.
C) DO NOT GOOGLE THOSE THINGS.
D) Ok yes the rickroll was just for fun. But seriously.
I don't usually make corrections like this, but since people might want to do a search, the name is spelt ‘Tracy Davis’.
I thought Harry was supposed to be as intelligent as Eliezer, but on the path sooner. Writing characters more intelligent than yourself is generally considered extremely difficult and not often done, though HPMoR breaks enough "rules" already that I wouldn't be too surprised if you were correct.
Except that students stay at Hogwarts for 7 years, not one, which would put the suicide rate at Hogwarts at one per 14 years, not one per century (if wizards commit suicide at the same rate as muggles). If you assumed that Wizarding suicide attempts were 5 times as likely to be successful, that would put the rate at one suicide every 3 years.
Of course, it's entirely possible that the wizarding resilience to illness and injury also makes them more resilient to mental illness, and that's why suicide rates are lower.
Alright, I'll Rot13 all this.
Something I've been trying to puzzle out for the past day, and failing. From Chapter 39, as Harry is talking to Dumbledore:
... (read more)Downvoted for the attitude. People in LessWrong generally understand the difference between "evidence" and "indisputable proof".
When you say that "we should let this idea die already", are you actually claiming that the similarity of the H&C and Quirrell statements in regards to Slytherin's monster is exactly zero evidence towards H&C and Quirrel having some connection between them? Are you really saying that the author is exactly as likely... (read more)
cough
Unless H&C needs to figure out (through legilimancy) who else Zabini might have told about his existence, so that he can go and obliviate them too.
Interesting. I hadn't even considered the possibility that the story about brainwashing Bellatrix might actually be true.
Eliezer,
Could we have an update every 10 days telling us where you are? Makes the waiting much easier, knowing we're getting more.
One like last time with #of words, chapter would be great.
The super awesomeness of HPMOR so far is what makes all the anticipation fun...
Blame not the users for doing what the site was intended to enable. Blame the suckiness of the interface.
I believe what you're proposing is a brainmod.
Who here is a little creeped out by Snape agreeing to kiss her in the latest chapter?
If you are creeped out, you are probably taking it out of context.
Sure, if you describe it as "he molested a minor and made her forget about it", it sounds quite creepy. But if you think of it as a lonely, inexperienced and deeply troubled boy thanking a girl fawning over him for her help in a tricky situation the best way he can, then maybe you will see that the difference in physical age does not automatically translate in this case into any kind of a power difference.
Not even remotely. It's a shame they couldn't do more.
There is a good reason to have laws that prohibit this kind of liaison - the potential for abuse is enormous. But this isn't a case that the rules are necessary for.
She's in Slytherin. I think Snape doesn't significantly abuse Slytherin students.
No. But it doesn't have to. If we stipulate instead that Dumbledore was untouchable during the actual war for practical reasons (say, being one of the most powerful wizards alive and the de-facto commander of an opposing force, hence well protected), Lucius is left with excellent reasons to go after him through legal channels after the war's over. Neither side seems to have been operating with the full blessing of the legal government, and terror tactics resulting in the death... (read more)
This begs the question, if Harry figure out the secret of the mirror, would he be able to construct an Occlumency proxy personality who didn't want the stone?
Of course there is no answer to this question except "Whatever the author decides."
I feel like a fitting conclusion would be for Voldemort's last remnant to end up on the Voyager spacecraft, so that he is forever in the stars, away from earth.
From chapter 76:
"I asked Professor Quirrell why he'd laughed," the boy said evenly, "after he awarded Hermione those hundred points. And Professor Quirrell said, these aren't his exact words, but it's pretty much what he said, that he'd found it tremendously amusing that the great and good Albus Dumbledore had been sitting there doing nothing as this poor innocent girl begged for help, while he had been the one to defend her. And he told me then that by the time good and moral people were done tying themselves up in knots, what they usually ... (read more)
I don't think that is what Quirrell is saying. He is criticising a real failure mode in in 'good' people.
Yes. Which is why the very next thing Harry said was
According to you:
The relevant quote would be from Chapter 20:
Yay, ethical egoism!
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but... what makes a focus-group groundhog day attack more useful than just, you know, having multiple focus groups?
It eliminates variation between focus groups. If people are as deterministic as depicted in MoR chapter 27, the slightest variation in behavior would be a clue about how to refine the ad.
Pettigrew hasn't spent the last eleven years as the Weasley family pet, because that would be ridiculous, but I doubt Sirius Black is guilty. At the very least, it would require more than obvious consistency preserving changes to justify that.
One thing that I've wondered about-and note that I'm not entirely sure if this is the right venue for asking- is what Eliezer thinks about the Visual Novel format a storyline structure (obviously not for MOR, that increases the entry barrier way too much for a cute and pop introduction to Rationality. ) I know that he decided to use the Normal/True ending for the Three Worlds Collide story, but what does he think about, let's say, the relatively long common route into different story branches format, the three "distinct" story format (Fate/Stay N... (read more)
I seem to recall there was some playing around with Suzumiya-style Anachronic Order in earlier MoR chapters, but it was pretty self-contained and easy to follow. Plus there's some just downright confusing parts- chapter opening quotes that are never referenced again, Aftermaths that don't seem to have anything to do with the previous chapter, stuff like that.
And there's definitely some real potential for an omake chapter of Bad Ends: Harry accidentally destroying Dumbledore's ability to cast the Patronus Charm, Harry insulting his mother to Snape just a little more, Harry saying the wrong thing to Lucius in King's Cross, Harry realizing aloud to Quirrel what the ritual to summon Death really was...
Harry successfully transfiguring nanotech.
I had actually been tossing around the idea of a fic where each chapter is a bad end for MoR, possibly one for each chapter. Working title: 'Everyone dies'.
One for each chapter? I'd read that.
When I'm done with the Hermione Granger route, I'm going to write the Luna Lovegood route, then the Bellatrix Black route, then the Draco Malfoy route, and then the harem ending!
April now, is it? Then the next thing that's going to happen is that everyone except Harry goes home for Easter (Easter Sunday was 19 April in 1992, and they'll probably take most of the holiday before it rather than after it since it's so late that year) and Harry's parents come to visit him. That should be interesting. I hope he's told them he's not allowed to leave Hogwarts.
No, that's a different reading of "can"; I guess by "can" I meant "I currently use magick but am unaware that I am doing so"; if we were talking about potential to learn magick then I'd have to put it at around 5%. Me unknowingly doing magick is more like a you know actually I'd rather not talk about that. Still probably a lot higher than others would guess but magnitudes lower than 5%.
Is this a typo? If not, I don't think it flows very well.
If an eleven-year-old can have Eliezer's knowledge of Bayes' Theorum or the ability to cite studies on most fallacies off the top of their head, they can come to the proper conclusions about death.
First: is the parenthetical comment meant to be a summation of the previous term? Second: agreed, as long as the definition of "great evil" includes the fact that roughly a hundred and fifty thousand people die every day.
... (read more)I still think he takes it as a confirmation that Voldemort is possessing Harry. Voldemort is much closer in age to Lucius then Draco. Voldemort playing strange games with your son is much more concerning then the boy who lived playing strange games with your son. Also consider Lucius's parting statement: "And as you have asked nothing more of me, I will ask nothing more of you."
Why would the boy who lived ask anything of Lucius? Voldemort certainly would.
That reading seems far-fetched.
Let's go over the conversation....
Part I: Lucius accosts Harry and speaks to him as if he were Voldemort. Harry pretends to be Voldemort (without meaning to). Lucius maintains his calm.
Part II: Harry goes "you think I could benefit from doing Draco harm. But it is irrelevant, Lucius. He is my friend, and I do not betray my friends." Lucius goes 'what the fucking FUCK?'
Part III: Longbottom arrives, Lucius asks Harry to send her away, Harry spouts the "my age" comment, and Lucius goes, "I do feel the fo... (read more)
Transfiguration?
It really doesn't. They teach transfiguration to the children from about 8 years old and some of them do not completely fail. They tell the students a bunch of things that are really dangerous to do. There are many people below the level of Voldemort who have both the knowledge and skill to kill people effectively with transfiguration if they so desire. It really isn't that much of a genius feat of creativity.
Relatively few fan-fictions are based around the crude exploitation of basic magic for the purpose of terrorism. This says a lot more about what makes a good story than about how hard it is for average wizards to play terrorist. Significant plot arcs about magical terrorists sound cooler if they use fancy dramatic magic that sounds mysterious and hard to acquire rather than the simplest thing that would work.
Most fanfics don't lean hard on dangerous!transfiguration...
Eek. Somehow I changed from 'cunning' to 'savvy' mid-word!
What do we know of the second Hat-and-Cloak:
=> not Quirrell or Snape
=> not anyone unknown
=>... (read more)
I think we should wait until the new arc to start, since going by past progress I would expect it sometime this week. If Eliezer could give us another progress update it'd help.
Oh, I did, and I'm working with one team ;)
But I was more looking for general informations and policies about translations. And maybe a way to organize them from LW (wiki or main). But I didn't get much reply here, so I just went on with other channels.
I don't understand Draco's exchange with Lucius at the end of Chapter 7. Anyone know what's going on?
Here are my thoughts, which of course may easily be completely wrong.
Facts: 1) Harry states, "So during the Incident at the Potions Shop, while Professor McGonagall was busy talking to the shopkeeper and trying to get everything under control, I grabbed one of the customers and asked them about Lucius."
2) Harry states, "So you really are his one weak point. Huh."
3) Draco's letter to his father asks about Harry's "weak point" co... (read more)
No secret information is required for Harry to come to his conclusion of "So you really are his one weak point. Huh."
Available evidence:
From this evidence it can be reasonably concluded that Lucius loves his son.
For a hard man like Lucius, this makes Draco his likely weakest point.
Lucius is simply underestimating Harry's ability to make good use of the available information (and possibly also underestimating how much Draco has given away while trying to cultivate Harry).
EDIT: 25 Jan 2012 - I just noticed that a previous incomplete revision of this comment appeared below by accident. It is now retracted...
I seem to recall when Eliezer mentioned Sirius/Pettigrew, people complained that the story was now slash and therefore horrible. Eliezer suggested that he would like to actually insert some m/m porn, just to upset these people further, but that writing such would be too actively unpleasant.
You know, I wonder whether Magical Britain has policies as liberal (American liberal, which I think means socialist in the rest of the world) as Real Britain. Somehow, I think not, but do we have evidence either way?
Ryvrmre npghnyyl vffhrq n Jbeq bs Tbq (JNEAVAT: GIGebcrf) ba gur znggre va bar bs uvf rneyl nhgube abgrf nsgre abgvat gung znal bs uvf ernqref jrer choyvpyl jbaqrevat nobhg gur vffhr, ohg gura ur tbg n pbhcyr bs erivrjf gung pbaivaprq uvz gb yrg gur zlfgrel fgnaq. Lbh pna fgvyy svaq gur abgr ba NqryrarQnjare'f nepuvir (gur bar yvaxrq gb va gur bcravat cbfg). Whfg tb gb gur frnepu one naq ybbx sbe gur jbeq "ubyl". Ubjrire, n ybg bs crbcyr jub unir ernq gur cebpynzngvba nccneragyl pbafvqre vg gb or n uhtr fcbvyre, fb ernq vg ng lbhe bja evfx.
Be ner lbh abg grpuavpnyyl ylvat ol fnlvat "ab bssvpvny fgngrzrag gung gur nhgube raqbefrf"?
And someone could just cast evanesco on the shield, now that I think about it.
There's a very subtle bit that I just realized that's worth mentioning as a possibility. Rot13 for spoilers:
Va puncgre 46, Uneel yvfgf uvf boivbhf jnlf bs uvqvat na bowrpg. Gur pbagrkg gurer urnivyl vzcyvrf gung uvf yvfg vf n fhofrg bs Ibyqrzbeg'f npghny ubepehk yvfg. Va gung yvfg Uneel fnlf
Fv... (read more)
My impression was that Lucius suspects Harry to be Voldemort, hence the I know it was you message after the Askaban breakout.
Harry has said that Hermione is his moral center. Is she? Should she be?
I have mixed feelings. She's hardly a paragon, and if she's going to continue to develop into her own character instead of a satellite of Harry, Eliezer's going to outline her faults in more detail. We've seen this with Harry. Every time he undergoes a trial, readers learn more and more how fallible he is, and why.
Thoughts?
Cranial capacity is about the same (reference wikipedia in my original comment). Also, our knowledge of their tool use is somewhat moot if we don't even know anything about a super advanced civilization. As in, what else are we missing about the past? The point about Africans is the strongest.
The most obvious motivation given what we know about Quirrelmort and what he needs to regain his old power is that he retrieved her for use in the spell that will restore his body. For his motive to be anything else would constitute a twist.
Oh. Sorry. (Tineye didn't turn up anything? That's surprising.)
Reference. Part of the point of being that oblique was not to give away the joke, but eh.
I just thought the wording of 'phoenix's price' was auspicious, I agree that that's an interesting and poetic idea. (And looking back through, the fire symbolism is even more robust than I remembered.)
Problem: Dumbledore (who presumably should know) says in Chapter 62
... (read more)People thought that was misogynist? Wasn't it a male being abhorred by a culture in which he may not be forced by a woman? Unless my memory fails me that's totally the wrong offense to be taking. :)
Why not use the epub or mobipocket versions, depending what the Kobo supports? Calibre reads both, the mobipocket is fine on my iRex and I have an epub version on my phone.
http://ikeran.org/rationality.epub http://ikeran.org/rationality.mobi
(mentioned on http://www.fanfiction.net/u/2269863/Less_Wrong ) Android, iPhone/iPad app links there too.
How do you reconcile this view with the Sword of Good story?
Tiled in pentagons? That I want to see. Or... not. Probably not.
I actually looked that up on my last reread. It turns out there are several known pentagon tilings, some of which are quite attractive, although of course none use regular pentagons.