Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality

8: I read S&W H40k without knowing anything at all about Evangelion or W H40k, and still enjoyed it. Most of what I know about both still comes from S&W H40k.

Re: harry surviving the killing curse: how do we know that he did? It's a given here that something very different happened at the Potters' house that night than in canon; Harry's memory under the Dementor's thrall in Humanism ends before Voldemort actually did anything to him (the bit about his eyes expanding like suns might or might not be simple artistic license). Maybe Voldemort did something completely different that also backfired, 'killed' him and scarred Harry. We know Bellatrix had his wand for some reason; maybe what happened was what he intended to happen.

Thanks for the help guys.

I was- WILL, be asking a question about my own personal shortcomings, and how to overcome them, not through some magic bullet, but actual lifestyle changes. Of course, this thread is not about my problems, it's about Harry Potter.

New chapter.

-saves new chapter to Instapaper, downloads epub, and transfers to Sony Reader-

EDIT: Well, that was a fiasco. 15 minutes my ass.

-tries FanFiction Downloader instead-

edited 27th May '11 9:08:45 PM by jaimeastorga2000

Plausible Deniability. Appropriate name.

Love the fact that no one's heads can get around the idea of helping mudbloods or not being card carrying villains.

As of 4:17am PDT, HPMOR is the #1 most-reviewed Harry Potter fanfiction on the entire Internet.

edited 28th May '11 7:47:16 AM by NowhereMan

Conglaturations! You have completed a great fanfiction, and proooved the justice of your philosophy. Now go rest our Yudowskys!

Hypothesis:the potion Lily gave Petunia was a placebo.

Harry said he saw the effects of magic on her when he went home for christmas. It merely being a placebo is unlikely.

"Re: harry surviving the killing curse: how do we know that he did? "

Indeed. Let's take two possible hypotheses: Hypothesis A - Voldemort cast Avada Kedavra on Harry. The curse rebounded, living a scar on Harry, and burning Voldemort to a crisp Hypothesis B - Voldemort didn't cast Avada Kedavra on Harry. He was trying to do something else. — Hypothesis A demands that someone struck by Avada Kedavra survived it — which has never before happened. That it rebounded — which has never before happened. That it left a scar on Harry — when it always leaves even its successfully killed victims unscarred. That it burned Voldemort to a crisp — when it leaves dead bodies looking fresh and untouched.

I think the probability of (A) is very VERY low, given the need for all the above improbabilities and the lack of witnesses or any other supporting evidence that we know of.

Plus, the first chapter begins with the seeming memory of a single word being shouted, and "avada kedavra" is two words. I think the single word is more likely to be something like "Horcrux".

Laughing and reacting now. Will sort out what I think of the chapter later.

Edit: Well. Thirty Xanatos Pileup has never been so much fun. :-D But why would Snape set the SPHEW up and smile when his patsy champion was beaten?

edited 28th May '11 5:37:06 PM by AckSed

Finally managed to read it.

OH. MY. GOD. This has got to be the best chapter since "63. TSPE, Aftermaths" (in other words, since the hiatus started). I was alternatively giggling like a schoolgirl and howling in laughter for most of the chapter. My inner shipper certainly got enough squee to keep running for a while... I think I'm gonna start shipping Methods!Hermione with Rational!Harry AND Rational!Draco. Hope they are up for it; surely Harry has come across the idea of polyandry in one or another of his speculative fiction novels, right? And he was talking about a three-way wedding a while back...

Anyway, shipping aside, I LOVED the first part of this chapter. Even from a purely platonic standpoint, Harry and Hermione's interactions were sweet in both the metaphorical sense and the exclamatory sense. Hermione's introspection as she lays on her bed is much more interesting than that of earlier chapters in the "Self Actualization" arc. I am not sure what changed, but when she was contemplating the hero's journey and thinking not of herself but of her friends that might get hurt... she actually feels like the hero of a story now.

k, I'm just gonna post this now. I might review more, but if I don't, I should at least submit this. If I do, I will edit or post as appropriate.

edited 28th May '11 7:34:40 PM by jaimeastorga2000

Congratulations! I think Rationality beats out the actual Harry Potter series in pretty much every way, as much as I like Rowling's books. Even though Harry is the protagonist, I think I empathize with Hermione far more than with any other fictional character I've ever seen. She reminds me of myself (and many I know) at the start of high school: a person who is smart and makes good grades but is realizing for the first time that those aren't necessarily all that's necessary to be successful, that one needs to be able to act for themselves instead of merely receiving tasks and completing them. Seconding that this most recent chapter was one of the best in a while; I found myself humming a boss battle theme by the end of the bully scene. Also kind of love the quirks of the minor characters... (Lavender Brown is a cosplayer?)

So, the obvious question is what is Snape doing? It seems evident that either he expected the Slytherin duelist to be defeated, or it was a test of the SPHEW girls that he was pleased that they passed. It's possible, I suppose, that he was simply testing them for the sake of testing them; however, I don't really think Yudkowsky would set up what he's done so far without having it lead into something.

My thought: Snape, obviously, has a thing about bullies. He spoke with Harry about it back in chapter whenever-he-did-that, and seemed impressed with Harry's actions, but Harry then shot that potential relationship to hell by misinterpreting Snape's experience with his mother. He's now trying to set up whatever he intended to set up with Harry with the SPHEW.

However, it also seems likely that Yudkowsky is doing something deep and authorial with Snape, given the fact that he seemed to regard that one entirely-incomprehensible scene with some schoolgirl having fantasies about him as a major plot hint. And I seem to recall that in the A/N where he first introduced the SPHEW he said that it was basically spontaneous, so I doubt it can tie too deeply into Snape's mysterious long-term role. In any event, it's interesting.

Re: Snape: The first horny-schoolgirl incident was, apparently, a major plot point, so it seems quite intuitive that so was the second—but somehow it's also related to Hermione, and hence presumably SPHEW. At first I thought that that was simply Snape setting things up with the duelist, but that seems insufficiently interesting to require Memory-Charmed services from anyone. Any thoughts?

I figure they did a priori incantatem on the wand left behind with his corpse. They might not have witnessed the events, but they could pull off a fair reconstruction based on the spells he used.

Snape's going to have a major mentor/mentee relationship with Hermione, so we need to establish early on that he's not into little girls *that way.*

Where the thing with Lavender came from? Is very simple. You see, while deliberate challenges don't always work on me, innocent, accidental challenges...

There was this guy in a USENET group who'd never read Methods of Rationality, and he said all spontaneous innocence, "Okay, I'll try it, but if Hermione transforms into Sailor Gryffindor, I'm giving up."

And I had no choice but to work Sailor Gryffindor in there somewhere, and give her a henshin scene.

QED.

I am now imagining Hermione going "MOON TIARA MAGIIIC!" and Harry throwing roses.

I blame you for this.

"I figure they did a priori incantatem on the wand left behind with his corpse. They might not have witnessed the events, but they could pull off a fair reconstruction based on the spells he used. "

Two things: First, you're confusing the easily cast "Priori Incantato" which reveals the *last* spell cast (and which might perhaps have revealed an Avada Kedavra being cast), with the "Priori Incantatem" which requires two wands of the same core.

Secondly, you don't really have evidence that they investigated Voldemort's wand at all — for all you know the wand he was wielding might have been completely burned alongside his burnt-to-a-crisp body. We already have been told that his *real* wand had been secreted away by Bellatrix Black at the time.

edited 29th May '11 7:49:33 AM by ArisKatsaris

"I think Rationality beats out the actual Harry Potter series in pretty much every way"

I think it's a rather unfair comparison to compare novels with a fic based on the novels, after the novels had to do all the hard work of introducing the world and the characters.

No evidence save for the fact that it would probably have been easy to do, and they claim to know what the last spell he cast was. There's a simple, established way of doing that; it's much more likely that they cast priori incantato on his wand in light of this claim than without it, that's the very definition of evidence.

The wand he took with him was the last one he used, the one with which his last spells were actually cast. That Bellatrix had his own personal wand makes no difference.

> No evidence save for the fact that it would probably have been easy to do,

You don't know if the wand was there and in a usable state. So it might not have been "easy", and you don't know if they could tell between an Avada Kedavra cast at Lily from an Avada Kedavra cast at Harry.

> and they claim to know what the last spell he cast was.

"They claim" is rather vague when we don't know who the "they" is who made the claim first. But yes, I'll concede that's technically evidence, yes, though rather weak evidence IMO.

I have this random image of reporters peeking over the windowsill, having made use of a time turner and invisibility cloak to get a first hand account of the events in question.

...

Actually, time turners make any sort of officially off-screen event ("Disappeared without a trace", "Never found the body", etc.) potentially shifty. Given apparating wizards with patronuses (patronii?), a lot of mobilization should be possible in twenty four hours.

@Eliezer, you realise of course now that you've introduced Sailor Gryffindor you're going to need to introduce the others too?

Sailor Slytherin will be particularly hilarious if it's Draco operating under a secret identity.

edited 29th May '11 3:47:53 PM by Capt.Fargle

@Aris: I agree; writing fanfic gives you a lot of advantages over having to explain the setting and characters entirely from scratch. At the same time, I think Rationality is the only fanfic I've read that's been significantly more enjoyable to read than the original series after reading both. Not saying it automatically makes it a better piece of fiction entirely in its own right, but it's definitely unusual for a fanfic to be more enjoyable than the original.