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 81, which should be published later today. The previous thread passed 400 comments as of the time of this writing, so it will pass 500 comments soon after the next chapter is posted, if not before. I suggest refraining from commenting here until chapter 81 is posted; comment in the 12th thread until you read chapter 81. After chapter 81 is posted, I suggest all discussion of previous guesses be kept here, with links to comments in the previous thread.
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.) When posted, chapter 81 should appear here.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
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Ok, this is quite old stuff, and maybe it has been discussed already, but I couldn't find it,. Chapter 25:
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.
And it led inevitably toward a single final conclusion.
The ancient forebears of the wizards, thousands of years earlier, had told the Source of Magic to only levitate things if you said...
'Wingardium Leviosa.'
No, not the ancient forebears. There are spells that sound "a lot older than Latin", and (at least in canon) there's a spell with incantation "point me" (Goblet of Fire, iirc).
So it looks like the spells haven't all been created at ancient times, but rather some spells have been created later. That is supported by McGonagall in Ch. 16, "people invent new Charms and Potions every year."
So, it seems there is some rather complicated way to invoke magic, and Charms present a shortcut that original discoverer of a spell has installed.
Why did it take more effort to cast the Alohomora spell, if it was just like pressing a button?
Probably because the spell only channels your magic, and there's a magical barrier that the locking spell has left, and that has to be overcome with magical strength. Or maybe it's more like pulling a lever than pressing a button. It's still efficient, but you still need some magical strength to perform the action.
Who'd been silly enough to build in a spell for Avada Kedavra that could only be cast using hatred?
As a safety mechanism. It prevents you from fooling around with the spell and killing somebody if you haven't actually meant it.
Why did wordless Transfiguration require you to make a complete mental separation between the concept of form and concept of material?
Since wordless Transfiguration doesn't have a word as a trigger, there needs to be a different mechanism for preventing accidental Transfigurationt. Going to some extra length mentally might be that safety mechanism
Hatred may not be the only way to cast Avada Kedavra, just as the happy memories are not the only way to cast the Patronus Charm, and Oogely Boogely doesn't need to be pronounced correctly if you don't care whether your bats glow. Maybe he'll discover a True Killing Curse.
I think that's Harry's point about Wingardium Leviosa. That it doesn't make sense for people many thousands of years earlier (as far back as Atlantis) to have created a spell that looks like a Latin-English mangling. That's why the immediately following sentence to the passage you quoted is:
[...]
So basically he had made a hypothesis (preprogrammed program-instruction by the people of Atlantis), but his theory seemed to collapse on this bit, that the language didn't fit.
1pedanterrific
Here's a question: how does excessive magic use cause unconsciousness? What's going on there, physically?
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 81, which should be published later today. The previous thread passed 400 comments as of the time of this writing, so it will pass 500 comments soon after the next chapter is posted, if not before. I suggest refraining from commenting here until chapter 81 is posted; comment in the 12th thread until you read chapter 81. After chapter 81 is posted, I suggest all discussion of previous guesses be kept here, with links to comments in the previous thread.
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.) When posted, chapter 81 should appear here.
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,nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
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: