Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 28, chapter 99-101

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Dec 12, 2013

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 99, 100, and 101. The previous thread is at nearly 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, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.

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"Tell me, son of Lily, do the Muggles in their wisdom say that soon the skies will be empty?"

Interesting tie-in to:

"HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD."

So the centaur and Trelawney seem to be reading from the same playbook. Any guesses to who the centaur approached sixteen years ago and what lines he crossed? Seems like a plausible time to be Lily, no? Could possibly be the payoff to this from Chapter 1:

"...And I begged her to use some of that magic on me so that I could be pretty too, even if I couldn’t have her magic, at least I could be pretty.”
Tears were gathering in Petunia’s eyes.
“And Lily would tell me no, and make up the most ridiculous excuses, like the world would end if she were nice to her sister, or a centaur told her not to – the most ridiculous things, and I hated her for it."

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the world would end if she were nice to her sister

Plausible, if her being nicer to her sister is why Harry got the upbringing he did instead of the canon one.

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Via: "Lily is nice to Petunia" -> "Lily makes Petunia prettier" -> "Petunia ends up with Michael and not Vernon" -> "Harry learns science instead of ptsd".

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“There is nothing above the folly of men,” whispered the voice from the emptiness. “There is nothing beyond the destructive powers of suﬃciently intelligent idiocy, not even the stars themselves.

“The Sun is very large, after all; I doubt the Dementor would have much eﬀect on it. But it is not a test I would like to try, Mr. Potter, just in case.”

“Is the Sun still in the sky?” said Professor Quirrell, still with that strange gentleness. “Is it still shining? Are you still alive?”

The destruction of the sun is a recurrent theme with Quirrell.

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"...The stars themselves proclaim your innocence, ironically enough."

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This seems to be the case. It all ties together to nicely not to be. Sixteen years ago, Firenze (I assume that is who the centaur is, from his views and attitudes) told Lilly that "the world would end if she were nice to her sister", based on the same prophecy based on which he tried to kill Harry: One that was similar to the one Trelawney made.

Remember also the twice-repeated wave of prophecies over the world, despite the fact that we are told that disturbances in time are never enough to cause more than a single prophecy. It would make sense that if any prophacy could be of such import, it would be one about the end of the world.

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Premise: Quirrell plays the game one level higher than Harry Potter.

Observation: This entire incident is uncharacteristically sloppy. Why were the unicorn corpses found? Why was Quirrell discovered?

Observation: Harry Potter is now really pissed off that herds of unicorns to slay aren't standard procedure for stable-izing people with life threatening injuries. He has just been given another "if only" to fixate on. It has been brought to his attention in ways that wouldn't trip his "why am I being told this" sense.

Father had told Draco that to fathom a strange plot, one technique was to look at what ended up happening, assume it was the intended result, and ask who benefited.

Hypothesis: Reminding Harry that there were ways the wizarding world could have saved Hermione was the primary effect. Possible secondary effects may include impressing on Harry just how ridiculously powerful he is. Perhaps implanting the desire to save Quirrell into Harry's mind? Quirrell may not actually need the blood right now, though I suspect it doesn't hurt.

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I know Harry is just a kid, but his reaction towards unicorns don't seem very rational to me. Remember, Harry became vegetarian for a while when he was afraid animals could be sentient. And now, he speaks about massively killing unicorns, magical creatures whose sentient status isn't very clear (like with phoenix), for a "temporary" stop of death at a cost of "permanent side-effects", without inquiring how temporary temporary is, what are those side-effects, and how sentient unicorns are. Without measuring those three parameters, there is no way to know if utility(killing unicorns in St Mungo) is positive or negative.

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I think it's less that Harry is a kid right now and more that he's specifically extra-freaked out than usual by perma-death at the time. Plus the Quirrel Distortion Field is keeping him from ever seriously considering anything Quirrel does as really evil.

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Why did Quirrell allow the unicorn corpses to be found? Why didn't he dispose of the corpse by making it disappear, instead of trying to pass it off as a predator? Would anyone notice if a unicorn vanished without leaving a corpse? ( I suppose they might, since they're medically valuable, but since unicorns are known not to have predators the predated corpse is hardly a good cover, as we saw. Vanishing the corpse would have made it take longer to notice.)

Anyway, this is one of the few times we see Quirrell's plot clearly failing without anyone actually acting to thwart him. Is it plausible that he was actually unable to kill and drink a unicorn without anyone immediately noticing?

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A nausea was in his stomach, a churning sensation that, looking back in memory, seemed both like and unlike a sense of guilt, as though it had the sensations but not quite all of the emotion.

Heh, so Quirrell doesn't know what guilt feels like.

Centaur spears can block many spells, but no one tries to block if they see that the spell is a certain shade of green. For this purpose it is useful to know some green stunning hexes.

This reminds me, if you can make a homing version of the stunning spell, can you make a homing version of the killing curse? Sounds like that would be useful.

The chapter endings for 100 and 101 are a little odd. They stop very abruptly, specially 101. Usually you would get an extra sentence or paragraph to give the chapter a sense of closure.

The reason Quirell and Harry cannot interact magically is supposed to be so Quirrell cannot read harry's mind, memory charm him, confound him, or outright imperio him. But this feels a little weak to me. What's stopping Quirrell from threatening, bribing, tricking, imperiousing, etc... a third party to do it on his behalf?

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And if the homing version of "Stupify" is "Stuporfy," how ridiculously twisted would AK get? "Averder Kerderber?"

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Abracadabra, surely.

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Nothing specifically to do with these chapters, but it's only just occurred to me: Is it supposed to be significant that the initials of Potter-Evans-Verres are also the start of "Peverell" (indeed, you can get more if you take a few more letters of "Verres")? It seems a rather superficial observation, but "Verres" is a really unusual surname and it would be nice to have an explanation for why Eliezer chose it.

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EndlessStrategy

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This isn't a particularly bad thing, but I must say, chapter 100 was perhaps the most self indulgent this story has had yet.

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Lets talk about chapter 99.

Chapter 99 was there for a reason. I think the most likely reason is to emphasize the 10 days later. Chapter 98 was April 20, and chapter 100 was May 13. For some reason EY wants the first attack to happen on April 30. This could be because QQ only needs to drink the blood every couple weeks. However, why not just make the first unicorn found on May 12 and have no chapter 99? This would make more sense. I would expect the forest to be searched immediately afterwords. This is empathized further in chapter 100:

Draco nodded; he distantly remembered hearing something along those lines a couple of weeks ago, toward the end of April.

Maybe the goal with this is to give some character a full 2 weeks to research unicorns or make a plan.

Other theories for chapter 99:

He wanted the reveal of the unicorn to fall under the Roles sequence for some reason.

He wanted to build suspense. (But then I would expect him to have posted 99 on Sunday and 100 on Wed.)

He wants chapter 99 to be written in passive voice to hide the identity of the person who "found" the unicorn.

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I think that the fact that chapter 99 falls into the 'roles - aftermath' title, indicates it's relatedness. This is the consequence of the roles arc, somehow - perhaps this is Quirrell's response to the new regulations, whyever that might be.

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The Severing Charm wouldn't bring down a tree, so he'd started partially Transfiguring cross-sections through the wood.

Quirell saw that. Partial transfiguration is not the power the dark lord knows not.

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Eliezer: I got the math joke.

Explanation and implementation (spoiler if you haven't spotted the joke yet): http://tinyurl.com/hpmor100mathjoke

(But this only covers the first half of the joke; I had not heard of the second half before!)

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If you want to play with a (rather tame, since it doesn't always use its regeneration powers) Bucholz Hydra, here's a link for you: http://www.madore.org/~david/math/hydra.xhtml

For my part, I knew about hydra games and had forgotten the name, but the context made it fairly obvious that this was a joke about the hydra being so hard to kill that you can't prove you do it with only Peano arithmetic.

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Not sure what to make of Harry's willingness to go to any length to preserve Quirrel. Immediate emotional reaction to the death of a 'friend'? Or change in underlying morality?

Not a fan of Twilight Sparkle dying.

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We're getting less of Harry's inner narrative than we did before the troll, so it's entirely possible that he's fully aware that Quirrell is almost definitely the big bad, but still wants him to live in spite of this.

After these latest chapters, though, I'm starting to think Harry's mind is being blocked specifically from anything that would harm Quirrell directly. Quirrell's perspective in chapter 89 says that he can't influence Harry directly through their connection, but Harry's "Dark Side" might be another matter. (How did Quirrell think talking to an Inferius like he was modifying its memories would help? He knows exactly how smart Harry is!)

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Reddit discussion of chp 99-101, which includes a few words from the author.

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Sooo... Quirrel knows a stunning hex that looks like Avadra Kevadra?

Then, back in Azkaban, facing that auror, when Quirrel used Avadra Kevadra in an attempt to force the auror to dodge, and Harry stopped it with his patronus...

...why did Quirrel not use the green stunner, unless Quirrel actually wanted to kill the auror?

And how long will it be until Harry asks that question?

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As in this comment: Probably Quirrell is lying. When he realized Harry was upset about the centaur dying, he thought fast and Inferiused the centaur and made up the bit about green stunners.

IIRC, in canon Avada Kedavra has a distinctive color not shared by any other spell.

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If Quirrell is lying, then asking the question "Why not use the green stunner in other circumstances where Avadra Kevadra was used?" may lead to that lie being uncovered.

I admit I had not considered Inferius on the centaur. However, I rather suspect that Quirrell is priming Harry here; he does something (hitting a centaur with a green stunner) that looks evil, then demonstrates that it is less evil than it was. In the future, then, Harry will be more inclined to believe that Quirrell has done something less evil than it looks like he has done; he could, for example, use Avadra Kevadra on Dumbledore later (making it look like a green stunner to Harry) in circumstances where a green stunner would not be evil and then rely on Harry to prevent any immediate revenge against himself (long enough to portkey away at least).

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Presumably, an Auror knows more about hexes than a centaur.

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You had to try to live the other person's entire life inside your own head, at least if you wanted to create the False Memories with less than a sixteen-to-one slowdown as you separately crafted sixteen major tracks of memory

Was this by any change a reference to Permutation City? That was 17× slowdown, but that could be explained by taking the ratio of real+simulated time. But I do not get the "sixteen major tracks of memory" then.

Far fetched, I know...

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