[FINAL CHAPTER] Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 122

The presence of Hermione's character totally changes the tone of the story, and reading this one, it became really clear how heavily the Sunshine General was missing from the last ~third or so of the story arc. Eliezer writes her very well, and seems to enjoy writing her too.

Harry's world was bleak without Hermione. Harry's love for Hermione, and even love for Humanity in general, had been missing for a while. He largely went into young Tom Riddle mode for a long time, without Hermione's influence.

Harry:

Being friends with you means that my life doesn't have to go the way Voldemort's did.

Recall Quirrell:

“Then here is what I might have done at your age, if there had been anyone to do it for—”

Hermione showed Harry the possibility of both love and understanding. He had love from his parents, and understanding from Quirrell, but both from Hermione. The world became a different place for Harry when he came to know Hermione.

Maybe I was expecting too much adulthood from Harry, but in every meaningful way but romantic, he loves Hermione, and Harry's evasion of that admission was disappointing, if not entirely out of character.

I have come to the conclusion that keeping the ultimate Source of Magic an unknown (for the scope of HPMoR) was probably a premise taken by EY early on. Otherwise we would have seen much more experiments to discover it (and more foreshadowing). That many (me included) have been waiting for it patiently is probably more a sign of our wishful thinking and neglect of evidence to the contrary than an oversight by EY.

ADDED: I wonder whether there is such a thing as negative foreshadowing, i.e. indications the some information will not be revealed later. Could be a smart literary device to reduce disappointment in these cases. Can one make reader go "Aha, Harry's quote about the difficulty of experimets fits nicely to Hermiones final remark that their schedule will take six years when taking outside view estimates into account"...

As EY mentioned somewhere: We writes Harrys parts by just writing down what he himself knows from memory. Now we have a datapoint about eYs recall of LotR.

This finally answers the question of why a shear transformation of the Mona Lisa appears on the Wikipedia page for eigenvalues and eigenvectors.

[Googles for a pic of the Mona Lisa] Yes, it works for me. I guess it's because of something like this.

Dumbledore receives prophecies.

Dumbledore acts them out.

As a result dumbledore winds up outside of time.

Dumbledore sends prophecies.

Profit.

I saw it as Dumbledore having chosen what persona to cultivate in order to best get away with his actions. Take, as a representative problem, that he has to make sure Harry carries his father's rock. He could try to assert authority and order it, but that would make him be seen as a tyrant. He could try to invent a good explanation, but he probably couldn't actually convince Harry, since he can't give the true reason and there isn't actually any other good reason. But by playing the benevolent eccentric, he can get Harry to humor him with minimal harm to his reputation.

What I love about this twist is how it changes the interpretation of so many other things that were said throughout the story. For example:

"Purposeless?" said Professor Quirrell. "Oh, but the madness of Dumbledore is not that he is purposeless, but that he has too many purposes.

It turns out PQ was right in that the madness of Dumbledore was not purposeless, however much his going around and "snipping all the threads of destiny" to constrain future events would, to anyone without all the knowledge of prophecy, look like many divergent purposes. Even Dumbledore himself didn't know how or why some of them fit into the whole picture. But it was all done in service of his one true goal. And if the service of that goal had involved killing Harry or framing Hermione? Well,

"Who knows what the Headmaster thinks he has reason to do, when he has found reason to do so many strange things already."

I spent twenty minutes reading it in reverse chronological order before I thought to check the header bar for chapter reviews. That was a mistake. Dude spends way too much time responding to anonymous hate; it's not fun to read and it can't be fun to write.

Now that I have found the chapter reviews, it's flowing a lot better (though still not perfectly by a long shot). I can sympathize with a lot of the things su3su2u1 found frustrating; I think there's a deep tension between HPMOR as a didactic tract and as a commentary on the canon Potterverse and as porn for nerds, among other things Eliezer's trying to do, and I think the cracks show the most in the early chapters. Similarly for the character of HJPEV himself. Not qualified to comment on the physics, but I did occasionally feel like I was being bullshitted when I was reading the fic.

As to the downvotes, I imagine someone -- two someones, judging by karma -- thinks you're concern trolling. Don't let it bother you.

I didn't give you a downvote, but I certainly want to downvote the linked site for a header that responds in a particularly nauseating fashion to the scroll wheel.

I like the name ‘Hariezer’.

There are a lot of things about Hariezer in the early chapters that enrage this guy and that also slightly bothered me. Many of them end up justified later, some much later when we learn that Harry was overwritten by Tom Riddle while a baby (not made into a Horcrux). It's not just that Hariezer has flaws, but that he has them for a reason. (The parallel with Eliezer's April Fools story are striking.)

I think that this guy has a fair point, however: that Hariezer's flaws can interfere with the pedagogical purposes of HPMOR.

Absolutely love it now that I've been pointed to it. Had many of the same thoughts myself. Still quite enjoyed geeking out and overanalyzing the story and figuring out what's going on and the occasional making-some-goddamn-sense of the Potterverse in between my more than occasional facepalms/ranting-at-friends about many of the same things this person complains about (writing and characters and bad science and author tract shoehorned ideology and Harry always just happening to come up with the right answer for no reason and other things they better articulate than I can).

And you're getting downvoted by the non-majority but most assuredly present personality-cult contingent.

Agreed, I didn't buy it either. Felt a bit like a forced end-of-episode moral in a kid's show.

I see the point of the Something to Protect article as being about growing past your current conception of how you should think and act. That you need something more important to you than whatever is anchoring you to your current rules of thought, in order to do that.

Say, when Harry realized he could have used Lesath to save Hermione from the troll, instead of thinking that would have been "sort of Dark-lordish", that seemed like an example to me.

Or when Quirrel accepted Harry's lesson about strategies involving kindness, and decided to train himself in those "until my mind goes there easily". Because it was more important to him to achieve his goals than to indulge in his distaste for everything that reminded him of Christmas.

But in chapter 114 I don't see anything holding Harry back that he needs to see past. The nanotubes solution was a purely technical thing that Harry would either think of or not, and we've known since chapter 16 that Harry can think of creative ways to kill his enemies. It's as if a known chess master made a really good chess move - it may be technically impressive, but in some sense it's nothing new. If some kind of something-to-protect-like growth happened to make that possible, it's not obvious. If Voldemort woudn't have been able to think of it in Harry's shoes and with Harry's knowledge of science and partial Transfiguration, it's not obvious either.

The dark side is Voldemort's thought patterns. In other words, Voldemort is constantly in the dark side.

Even without the enhancements, in real world terms Hermione was the most admirable character. Harry was a young boy with an old genius's brain patterns and an Oxford professor of science to raise him. Not really a fair benchmark to compare a 12 year old with.

She got better grades than Dumbledore did at her age, was beating the young Tom Riddle with a time turner in class, and beat Harry and Draco in the first battle, with neither a mysterious dark side nor military training. It was Hermione who knew more than than Draco and Harry how to properly make use of her army. It was Hermione who formed and led a band of Mighty Heroes.

It was Hermione who was fundamentally decent and had a moral rudder. A leader, brilliant, brave, and good. As long as she lived, it was clear that the future would belong to Hermione. No sparkling required.

Does it really nullify the criticisms of sexism? The Self Actualization arc remains mostly the same, Hermione is one of the characters that gets the least "upgrades" compared to canon for most of the story, so is McGonagall she's still fridged for the sake of Harry's quest (although I don't think that fridging is a good criticism), she ends up awesome through no actions of her own and her future is steered by Harry. People who criticized HPMOR for being sexist won't change their mind because of this ending.

As Harry's pet?

EDIT To head off the inevitable need to clarify myself, I clarify now: This refers entirely to Hermione's current status as the not-in-the-know smiling gofer being handed her role by the ever so wise 11-year-old savior and master of the fate of the universe who is of course the only person who could ever guide the whole fricking world in such a way that it won't be destroyed and tell her what she should be because reasons. And of course she just takes it. I interpreted this not as sexism but as the exaltation of Harry over all others who are of course less than sane/rational/special/human/important/worthy/cosmically-significant for basically no reason other than Time Says So. And everyone just goes along with it. That whole aspect of this whole chapter (and the last several) made me cringe. For multiple reasons.

Welp, different strokes I guess. I didn't like the Azkaban arc so much, and I quite like the ending. On the one hand, I agree that if a substantial fraction of readers are unsatisfied, there's probably something Eliezer could fix. On the other hand, I got mine, mwahahaha.

This is pretty exactly how I feel.

The closest I get to that emotional peak is when Hermione starts optimising, but even that feels a bit abrupt. Maybe it's because we're only seeing Hermione from the outside; my brain is not content to just interpolate her journey from being eaten by a troll to reinventing heroic responsibility in more humble language.

I didn't see this chapter so much as mockey of canon-Potter, merely bouncing off of it, noting it's different. Canon HP is not this HP, mainly reasons for which canon HP cannot be blamed.

Why does it being blatant mean it is no longer humorous? Sure, a subtle joke can be more humorous for its subtlety, but not being subtle doesn't necessarily preclude a joke's enjoyment.

There are many forms, and EY is probably trying catering to a range of people's sense of humour.

Indeed, thank you for all the good times spent reading it, and then reading it again, and also for the thoughts and will to learn more that came with these readings.

When reading this chapter I couldn't help but think of another parallel in that Hermione is going to be the one-person special ops division of a world-saving conspiracy.

Well, hopefully this conspiracy will be a lot more effective and ethical.

There is very little British in this fic, except for repeatedly mentioning McGonagall's accent.

You see, now EY provokes you into writing some rationalist HPMOR fanfiction before he publishes the epilogue.

Isn't it a little out of character for Harry to blithely assume that Hermione can't possibly die in her dementor mission? He doesn't even know how Horcrux 2.0 works--is there any good reason to think that the Horcrux will preserve your life if you deliberately fuel your magic with your life to kill dementors? (It's basically just a body-hopping spell, not a life-preservation spell.) Would a horcrux restore to Harry the life and magic he used to revive Hermione?

It just seems suspiciously out of character that Harry has now suddenly turned into an optimist with regard to Hermione's survival. He even says to himself he would never let her risk the mission if he thought it was actually dangerous, which means that he apparently actually fully buys into her immortality.

It will be tragic for Harry if she is dead again, for real, next week. Not because death is tragic per se, but because it will utterly blindside him.

I have tried this. Mixed results.

Yes, it would have been nice to see Hermione really start to fulfill her badass potential. But this was a pretty good place to end the story.

Trolls are bald, and I don't know if they have fingernails. If they do, then there's probably a set length up to which troll nails will regenerate without further growth.

Nah. There are better ways to keep yourself safe than invisibility, whereas Hermione will be running around adventuring. Sure, it's very hard to kill her, but if she needs to, say, rescue a hostage or something, that won't necessarily be relevant.

2) A fanfic where smarter versions of canon characters fight each other with complicated plots.

Hogwarts Battle School

Let's not forget this:

But I knew the Muggles would eventually destroy the world or make war on wizardkind or both, and something had to be done if I was not to wander a dead or dull world through my eternity. Having attained immortality I needed a new ambition to occupy my decades, and to prevent the Muggles from ruining everything seemed a goal of acceptable scope and difficulty.

Not sure what definition of ambition you are using but

a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work.

seems to fit pretty well.

Eliezer said this would just have been Harry antimatter-suiciding and Hermione waking up in a flaming crater.

With Dementors out of the way, the cost of telling people the secret of the True Patronus becomes a lot lower.

It started happening well before the story was complete...

It does address it. What we call heroic action is high combat ability and resources deployed for good. Hermione's point is that privileging that particular class of good works is an error - The proper measure of virtue is if you do the things which fall within your reach. Thinking in terms of heroes is a distraction,

Note that wizarding britain still largely fails hard on this count.

There are just people who do what they can, whatever they can. And there are also people who don't even try to do what they can, and yes, those people are doing something wrong.

Sounds like an answer to me.

Most people simply didn't have the power to combat Voldemort. Doing what you can isn't getting yourself killed trying to do what you can't.

Meanwhile, QuirrellHero did have the power (under the fraudulent scenario where he was supposedly opposing Voldemort).

There are some problems with the moral theory "with power comes responsibility", but the application to Quirell's scenario is clear enough.

There are people who do what they can. And there are also people who don't even try to do what they can, and yes, those people are doing something wrong.

So according to her, someone who's walking away from a fight he could fight is wrong, as is someone who never lift a finger when he could have.

I believe he means one set 6 years after these epilogues, i.e. when they would have graduated from Hogwarts.

Probably nothing, but it would require a series of improbable coincidences (every atom in future!Harry needs to be in the same position that past!Harry saw it in), significantly complicating the loop. Such complications would make it simpler for the loop to not happen at all, and so it probably wouldn't. A precommitment to interact with your future self as little as possible would then maximize the probability that the loop occurs in the first place.

Quirrell tried to create an aligned successor and failed. Hard. He literally imprinted his own cognitive patterns and shaped Harry the entire year, and still failed.

I was repeatedly flashing back to a certain youtube Q&A session...

Star-lifting isn't well known even among sci-fi fans in 2015. In 1991 you would have to be a fairly serious space-geek/sci-fi fan to know about it.

Without going back to The Good Book, it was perfectly clear to Harry at the end "tear apart the stars" prophecy could just refer to Harry harvesting the stars for resources.

ok, I'll peak.

Unseen by anyone, the Defense Professor’s lips curved up in a thin smile. Despite its little ups and downs, on the whole this had been a surprisingly good day—
“He is here. The one who will tear apart the very stars in heaven. He is here. He is the end of the world.”

Does that mean that Quirrell knew the exact prophecy? And Dumbledore knew it too.

Were Quirrell and Dumbledore basing his worries about Harry destroying the stars on the prophecy?

Shouldn't they just have asked? "Hey, what could it mean if someone is supposed to "tear apart the very stars in heaven"?

But Dumbledore then tells it to him in his letter anyway. And Quirrell discusses his apprehension that Harry will destroy the sun, but doesn't mention the prophecy at the time. It seemed like there was a lot of heartburn over something Harry could have cleared up in a minute.

Or 3141 May 9.