Things I’ve been reading lately include Tales of Mu (original, still reading this) and Black Cloaks, Red Clouds (Naruto, incomplete).  Dirty Old Men (Naruto, incomplete) was surprisingly funny but started out slow; I’d recommend skimming everything before Ch. 5, and even then it takes a while to get to the hysterical cackling parts.  All of these have adult themes somewhere, may the young and innocent be warned.

Shannon (Chaotic Shannon in Ch. 78) is once again offering life coaching / counseling, especially people with productivity problems or who are fighting depression.  I checked with some of the readers she previously got from HPMOR and they seem to have positive reports so far.

The current top post on /r/HPMOR is a proposal that using babies to make horcruxes is a net ethical positive.  You’d do well on LessWrong.com, Ilverin.

I don’t have super high hopes for May but will definitely try to offer you a more exciting progress report come June 1st, 2013 at 7PM Pacific Time.

I was recently in the middle of a first read of The Truth, a Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett; and then I switched in midday to rereading Harry Potter and the Natural 20 by Sir Poley and realized that HPN20 is funnier, more gripping, and just generally better.  Now The Truth is not shaping up to be the best Discworld novel Pratchett ever wrote and I wouldn’t necessarily say that HPN20 was funnier than Sourcery or more gripping than Mort but still, on side-by-side comparison HPN20 seems like it would be considered at least average for a Terry Pratchett novel if Terry Pratchett had written it.  I just thought Sir Poley might enjoy hearing that particular opinion of mine, which may or may not be shared by any particular reader.  And HPN20 just finished Harry and Milo’s first year, so it’s a good time to read or reread.

The next Progress Report will appear on May 1st, 2013 at 7PM Pacific Time.

The new website of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is up at intelligence.org.

Metamed is a medical startup by some highly rational friends of mine:  Instead of just having “evidence-based medicine” in journals they will provide you with actual evidence-based healthcare.  If you have a sufficiently serious problem and can afford their service, they will (a) put someone on reading the relevant research literature who understands real statistics and can tell whether the paper is trustworthy (yes, a lot of the p-values out there are complete garbage); and (b) refer you to a cooperative doctor in their network who can carry out the therapies they find.  This is a new service and it has to interact with the existing medical system, so they are currently expensive, starting at $5,000 for a research report.  (Keeping in mind that a basic report involves a lot of work by people who are good with math and computers.)  This seems well worth it if you can afford it:  There are amazing things out there, in the scientific literature, that most doctors have never heard of – and Metamed will find them for you and find you a doctor who can implement them.  (The startup was partially inspired by the case of a woman who had her fingertip chopped off, was told by the hospital that she was screwed, and then read through an awful lot of literature on her own until she found someone working on an advanced regenerative therapy that let her actually grow the fingertip back.  Basically, Metamed will find this sort of thing for you if it exists, and you would be surprised how often it does.)

If you know somebody who’s sick and can afford it – especially if the standard healthcare system has failed them, and they want their next step to be better science instead of ‘alternative medicine’ – please do refer them to Metamed immediately.  We can’t all have nice things like this someday unless somebody pays for it while it’s still new and expensive.

On the lighter side, I recommend the recursive fanfic “Friendship is Optimal: Caelum est Conterrens” (Heaven Is Terrifying).  This is the first and only effective horror novel I have ever read, since unlike Lovecraft, it contains things I actually find scary.  You may or may not need to first read My Little Pony: Friendship is Optimal.  I would recommend reading FiO first to get acquainted with the Optimalverse, but Caelum est Conterrens was written by a much more experienced fanfic writer and you might consider moving onto Conterrens directly if Optimal isn’t doing it for you.  Also, you have no idea how hard it is not to write my own take on the Optimalverse, which is something I’m not doing so I can put all my available writing energies into Methods.  I want relationship credit for this.

The next Progress Report will be posted on April 1st, 2013 at 10PM Pacific Time.

Many correct identifications of Miss Chloe’s Epileptic Trees in Ch. 86, but still nobody’s gotten the vrooping thingy.  Win some, lose some.

I’m afraid I don’t have much new fanfiction to recommend – but did run across The Best Night Ever (Groundhog!MLP) and Imperfect Metamorphosis (Touhou, long).  In ‘mainstream’ fiction, Sanctum wasn’t bad but it won’t be everyone’s cuppa tea, so I recommend having a Kindle or a Kindle app so that you can download a sample first.  (I don’t understand why people ever bought books before they could download samples of things.  Libraries?  Physical bookstores where you’d sit around reading the few opening chapters?)

The organization formerly known as “Singularity Institute” is now the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.  We haven’t changed our actual mission, but since our organization was founded the word “Singularity” has become associated with toomuchotherstuff in general and Ray Kurzweil’s ideas in particular.  We’ll just talk about self-improving AI and I. J. Good’s intelligence explosion from now on.

Next Progress Report on March 1st, 2013 at 10pm Pacific Time.

• Writing notes for Ch. 87
• Further notes on Ch. 86
• Update on the Singularity Institute
• Miscellaneous notes
• Fanfiction recommendations

Writing notes for Ch. 87:

Come on, you knew Harry was going to screw up that conversation.

Important science note!  The referenced work by Andrew Critch on hedonic awareness is not yet published science.  It’s his private work that he developed at the University of Berkeley for a course on psychology for mathematicians; brought to the Center for Applied Rationality; and then developed into a CFAR workshop unit.  Since the literary theory of HPMOR holds that Science Is Timeless, presumably in the MoR-verse Critch published in 1987 and Harry read about it.

Multiple people asked what would happen if Harry had taken the phoenix-ride to Azkaban in Ch. 85.  LinkHyrule5 answers with the fan-fanfic Innocence.

Cameos for Ch. 87:  Sir Gareth (donated by Mystic Marbles), Crozier (Mad Hatter LCarol), Tano Wolfe (Purely Sadistic), and Katherine Scott (Byakubyaku).

Further notes on Ch. 86:  I would like to point out that Snape’s behavior change is what I was trying to drive at with the Alissa Cornfoot aftermath in Ch. 28.  The point being that Alissa Cornfoot had been gazing longingly at Snape since the start of the year and yet he’d just now told her “I begin to find your stares disturbing”.  I’m not sure, but I think a grand total of zero people got this.  Have I mentioned that I often overestimate how blatant I’m being about something?

Due to Conservation of Confusion, there is now a new thing so subtle that nobody got it, the vrooping thingy (I did not mean that to be a Tardis, that is not what a Tardis looks like).  Pretty sure somebody’s going to correctly realize what Chloe’s theory is about, though.

Update on the Singularity Institute:

A quick update on the Singularity Institute (in case some substantial fraction of SI fans are reading this and are not on SI’s email list).  We’ve sold the Singularity Summit to Singularity University and are going to change our name to something that doesn’t have “Singularity” in the title (we’re still doing market research on what exactly – mainly we want to signal credibility to potential mathematician employees).  Trying to make the word refer only to I. J. Good’s intelligence explosion thesis and not refer to general technoyay was just a lost battle.

We’re looking to focus more on research going forward, and possibly even initiate primary AI research if we can find sufficient math supergeniuses to work on it.  If you are reading this and you are a math supergenius and you want to save the world, this might be a good time to get in touch with us again – we’re not ready to hit GO but we’re starting to look into it.  Please do not leave out the part of your email wherein you explain your impressive math credentials/accomplishments – yes, we know you’re shy, lots of mathematicians are shy, but you’ve got to tell us that you’re a good mathematician or we won’t know.  Also, the Singularity Institute is currently running a Matching Challenge and all donations to the Singularity Institute will be matched dollar-for-dollar up to $115,000 until January 5th, 2013.

Miscellaneous notes:

A special shoutout to the incredible Russian translating team at HPMOR.ru.  The “hpmor” keyword gets a lot of Twitter hits from Russia these days, so whatever you’re doing, it’s working.  Many thank-yous to Jack Dilindjer, Moira, Lavash, Loonyphoenix, Alaric, Xeye, StrangeCat, Sergcold, Klekle, Alexqwesa, Chaika.che, Polina, Baskakov, You_know_who, Anzy, and Yuliy.

A double bonus shoutout to the HPMOR Podcast, which has casted character voices and… everything.  The full credits list for the HPMOR podcast is here .

/r/HPMOR is still highly active and has now reached 2,400 subscribers.  Good job for starting it, jaiwithani.

Those of you who want to read every single paragraph I write, no matter how inane, should note that I, too, have given up and am now active on Facebook.  At some point I’ll probably give up and just Friend everyone who asks, but meanwhile, there’s Subscribe.

My friend Lindsey wishes it known that she has rooms for rent on Airbnb, in Berkeley, CA, (with room still available for the holidays).  You know where to rent a room if you want to be near rationalists!  My friend Shannon wishes to say once more that she’s offering life coaching / counseling, especially people with productivity problems or who are fighting depression, and that she has some idea of how to handle rational folks at this point.  :)

Fanfiction recommendations:

At the top of the list is Harry Potter and the Natural 20 by Sir Poley.  Explicitly Methods-inspired, with a D&D Munchkin (minmaxer) transported into the canon Harry Potter universe, except that canon!Quirrell is smart.

I’ve also enjoyed reading the Mahou Sensei Negima manga - for the love of Cthulhu stay away from the anime – though it takes a few chapters to really get started.  Be warned, this should not be the first anime/manga you watch/read, it presumes trope awareness.

Further suggestions:

• Unequally Rational and Emotional (Negima x Everything; starts off slow but had me laughing for solid hours by the later chapters)
• Naruto: Game of the Year Edition (Naruto discovers he’s living inside a video game and begins to adapt accordingly)
• Big Human on Campus (Slightly-cracked!Ranma enters the Rosario x Vampire campus and nobody there believes he’s actually a human)

Still working my way through Prince of the Dark Kingdom (Voldemort won), a great fic for everyone who thinks HPMOR is too short.

And the oldies but epicies, though I’ve already recommended them:

• Fallout Equestria (MLP:FIM)
• Dungeon Keeper Ami (as a single book)
• Time Braid (Naruto)
• Hybrid Theory (Mega Crossover)
• Luminosity (rational!Twilight)

And outside the world of fanfiction, if you haven’t read the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett, you have no right to complain about there not being enough HPMOR.

Pro-tip:  When it comes to reading things from Fanfiction.net on your Kindle, you can’t beat FlagFic.  (Just don’t forget to leave a review afterward!)

Pro-pro-tip:  Being subscribed to a number of fanfiction works-in-progress, these days I handle chapter updates via the following process:  Click on the Gmail message; click through to the new chapter linked; click a Read Later bookmarklet to send the URL to Instapaper; wait a week for several such items to accumulate; use the development version of the Instapaper news fetcher on Calibre to download the collected items as a newspaper; use Calibre to send the newspaper to my free.kindle.com address so it automatically and freely downloads into my Kindle.  After setting it all up, it goes a lot faster than it sounds, but it took a while to set up and there’s definitely room for somebody to make this easier for non-hackers.

The next Progress Report will post on February 1st, 2013 at 10pm Pacific Time.  (This gives us some time for actual Progress to have occurred, I hope.)

See you all around!

• Writing notes.
• Update on the Center for Applied Rationality.
• Massive combined fan-art update.

Writing notes:

85:  The new revised version of Ch. 85 is something I could not get right in time for the end of the last update string – I started by posting 78 before 85 was finished – so I gave up and wrote the previous alternate ending.  Also, I didn’t want to have the fic spend a long time with a current stopping-point quite that gloomy.

86:  I regret that I could not come up with any reasonable way to have Harry shout “Temporal fugue!” or “Kage bunshin no jutsu!” before attacking.

If you’re wondering why the heck Ch. 86 took so long, it can be summed up as:

• 70%: Not enough hours to work on HPMOR.  86 & 87 arrived courtesy of my employer authorizing me to work full-time on Methods for a week.
• 30%: Ch. 86 is (1) a bunch of fiddly things that needed to happen before the next arc so everything keeps moving in the right direction, (2) mostly in the form of dialogue affecting people’s states of knowledge, in (3) a ‘reaction’ chapter where momentum is naturally low.  I ended up deleting a good deal of what I wrote for 86 because it just wasn’t possible to pack in all the fiddly stuff, and I figured I was probably overestimating how much fiddly stuff was needed.

Ch. 87 (Hermione-centric) went much faster and will go up on Friday.

Ch. 88 must begin a longer sequence and the longer sequence has some fiddly bits.  So there’ll probably be another interval before Ch. 88 and its attached sequence gets posted.

Center for Applied Rationality update:

The Center for Applied Rationality is holding 4-day workshops on Jan 25-28 and Mar 1-4.  These are high-intensity workshops aimed at entrepreneurs, hackers, and other ambitious, analytic folk; no prior LessWrong.com reading required, general backgrounds OK.  These workshops should provide a well-rounded spectrum of practice in the most critical cognitive skills that CFAR has developed and refined.  We should have at least one or two big names at these.

These workshops are aimed at people to whom it can provide a lot of value, and priced accordingly, during a time when CFAR hasn’t yet scaled up fundraising and is using these workshops to fund core operations.  Nonetheless, partial financial aid is available for the workshops on a needs basis.

This brings me to CFAR’s Inaugural Fundraising Drive, a $60,000 Matching Challenge in which your donations will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to $60,000, until Jan 31st, 2013.

CFAR could make very good use of a lot more money than this while starting up.  I don’t work for the Center for Applied Rationality and they don’t pay me, but their work is sufficiently important that the Singularity Institute (which does pay me) has allowed me to offer to work on Methods full-time until the story is finished if HPMOR readers donate a total of $1M to CFAR.

CFAR is hiring.  Who, and how many people, will depend on how the fundraising goes.  Please apply regardless – it can’t hurt.

Mega combined fan-art update:

• Dylan Vaughan: Quirrell being a BAMF 
• Dzhu:  1 2 3 4 5 6
• Vadim Kulikov: Confess Your Ignorance
• David Capito (cameo in Ch. 86): Path to Azkaban
• Rose Pinnisi: Somewhere in the Dungeons
• Purely Sadistic:
  • Chaos Legion music
  • Hermione’s theme music:  Innocence
  • The Three Generals (perhaps the most beautiful three-generals art I’ve seen so far; also, note Draco’s background)
  • Impending Sense of Doom
  • General Granger (as she descends into water)
• Shallandavar: Tricia Glasswell
• Mystic Marbles:  Charred Memories
• Pencil-Monkey:  Luna Lovegood

New inspired works (fanfiction with explicitly similar rationalist themes):

• Harry Potter and the Natural 20 by Sir Poley (a D&D Munchkin is transported into the canon universe by a summoning gone wrong; smart!canon!Quirrell; author has confirmed explicit Methods inspiration).
• Friendship is Optimal by Iceman (an Equestria MMORPG with a real AI built to play Celestia – more AI than cogpsych)
• Myou’ve Gotta Be Kidding Me by DataPacRat (a rationalist arrives in Equestria… as a cow)

Cameos:  Ch. 86:  Samantha Crowley (Harry-Potter-Addict).  David Capito.  Beth Martin.  Colleen Johnson (donated by Tavoriel).  Pencil-Monkey, as Unseen University character Adrian Turnipseed.  Nancy Hua.  Nathan Rehfuss.  Sherice Ngaserin (Ilae).  Shehla (Shallandavar).  Chloe.

Ch. 87 will be posted on Friday, December 21st, at 7PM Pacific Time.

If there is no new chapter posted before then, the next Progress Report will be on 10PM Pacific Time of Jan 2nd, 2013.  (Not the 1st, this time, because I might be doing something else on New Year’s Day.)

Meanwhile, in hopes my own tastes can prevent you from starving, fics I’ve finished and enjoyed lately include ”Naruto: Game of the Year Edition” (Naruto discovers he’s living inside a video game and begins to adapt accordingly) and ”Big Human on Campus” (Ranma enters the Rosario x Vampire campus and nobody believes he’s actually a human), both of which are much better, and much funnier, than their premises perhaps sound.

It’s getting shockingly hard to find enjoyable reading material anywhere, including in mainstream science fiction and fantasy.  I think that reading fanfiction has trained me to expect a certain amount of funny and awesome in my stories, and mainstream SF&F, whatever its other virtues, is not delivering the quantity of hedons per second I have come to expect.  I mean, yes, have your characters suffer and character-develop, but also have them strap a solid-fuel rocket to a broomstick, ya know?  I try to read the mainstream stuff now and nobody in the novels is having any fun even when I’m a third of the way through the book.  It’s like they don’t even realize their readers might want sympathetic hedons along with the suffering and character development.

Signing off until next time, hoping it’s soon,
Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Under the circumstances, I think I’d better answer a question that I’ve been a bit coy about up until now:

• I knew from literally the first chapter how the story would end.  We have not gotten lost.
• The fic’s plot will resolve at least as much as got resolved in the original Rowling books.  All currently open plot parentheses will be closed – I never drop a stitch without meaning to pick it up.
• We have two major story arcs (and a couple of intervening chapters) left to go before the end of the story.

I wish I could just post Ch. 86 when that monster’s done – I’m strongly tempted to – but it doesn’t come at a very good break point to leave the story.  It’s not so much a dramatic cliffhanger, as that it wouldn’t be a finished place to leave things while writing the rest of the arc.  I’ll finish Ch. 86, see if the rest goes faster, and then if it doesn’t go faster, post Ch. 86.

The fic is not abandoned; I’ve been working on it.  I just haven’t had the time to work on it for more than 30 minutes at a time.

All this non-HPMOR you’ve been getting has produced, among others, the following Less Wrong posts you might like:

• The Useful Idea of Truth
• The Map is Not the Territory
• The Fabric of Real Things
• Causal Diagrams and Causal Models
• Stuff that Makes Stuff Happen
• Proofs, Implications, and Models
• Logical Pinpointing

After the Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 sequence (the rest of which has already been written) comes the next and really important sequence Open Problems in Friendly AI - I also have this whole day job where I try to save the world, remember.  Writing math explanations is hard if you want to do it right with the neat illustrations and everything.  But all things end, and that Sequence too shall be finite.

Good fanfiction I’ve read lately:  Harry Potter and the Natural 20 is to the great art of Munchkinism what HPMOR is to rationality-in-general (the author has confirmed that HPMOR was explicit inspiration for the story, so I’m counting it as Rationalist Fanfic).  Remember, there’s a whole genre out there waiting to be invented – you don’t have to wait for me to write it!

Elaine, she of the beautiful and haunting fan music “Sphere of Stars” for Ch. 20, has a released a new album “Personal Growth” on Bandcamp.  Listen for free, purchase for $5.

Shannon Friedman (Chaotic Shannon in Ch. 78, also my girlfriend) is still accepting coaching/counseling clients, specializing in productivity unblocking and depression.  If you’ve got a problem with either productivity blocking or depression, give this (or something like it) an immediate try to see what happens (it often beats not talking to anyone and quietly suffering).

The Center for Applied Rationality is running a 3-day intensive workshop on Rationality for Entrepreneurs, Nov 16-18 in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.  This new improved workshop is aimed at attendees not previously familiar with LessWrong material – especially startup cofounders and other business leaders, but all attendees are welcome.  It’s priced higher, and will deliver value accordingly (or your attendance fee will be refunded).  If you want an intensive course on the most valuable cognitive techniques for daily life and daily entrepreneurialism, sign up now.

More generally, to anyone who wants to live in a saner world: the Center for Applied Rationality is now in that vital startup stage where every dollar matters – where donations greatly shorten the timeline to better research, and determine who can be hired as the first employees.  There’s a chance here to reach up toward that impossible dream of a better world where people aren’t crazy all the damn time, because believe it or not, nobody’s really tried anything like this before.  If you’ve got the power to fund this sort of thing – drop by our Berkeley office and talk to us, or attend a workshop and see for yourself what’s going on.  Or just act immediately.  Science, reason, and rationality – it’s what Muggles use instead of magic, and it’s all we’ve got.

The next Progress Report will be posted on Dec 1st, at 10PM Pacific Time.

Slightly later tonight on LessWrong.com (i.e. before midnight), I hope to publish the first post of a new Sequence, Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners, which will update at least 3 times a week after that.

Aaron Tucker of Harvard would like to set up an HPMOR readers’ meetup, or just meet any other HPMOR readers going to Harvard.  He can be emailed at aarontucker@college.harvard.edu, and will be physically present on Thursday October 11th at 9 PM in the Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub.

The r/HPMOR subreddit continues to be highly active.  Now up to 1,640 Bayesian Conspirators!

Word to the HPMOR Podcast, now with its own dedicated site – they’re up to Ch. 67 and with some pretty high production values, having redone some of the earlier chapters too!  Also word to the Russian, Czech, and French translations, respectively up to 57, 53, and 83.  HPMOR.ru is a large collaboration of high quality, with participation by Jack Dilindjer, Moira, Lavash, Loonyphoenix, Alaric, Xeye, StrangeCat, Sergcold, Klekle, Alexqwesa, Chaika.che, Polina, Baskakov, You_know_who, Anzy, and Yuliy.

Things I’ve finished reading lately:  The over-a-million-words Negima / Mega Crossover fanfiction Unequally Rational and Emotional which starts off slow but had me laughing for solid hours by the later chapters; Eric Falkenstein’s new book The Missing Risk Premium (urgent reading for any investor who thinks there’s a risk premium); and the Mahou Sensei Negima manga (for the love of God stay away from the anime and movies).

Next Progress Report on Nov 1st, 10PM Pacific Time.

/r/HPMOR on Reddit now has 1,367 subscribers.  (!)

I’ll be visiting New York on September 24th, and on the rest of the East Coast probably also Boston and possibly New Haven, both for business purposes and to officiate the wedding of a couple of good friends.  If you’re interested in becoming a major supporter of the Center for Applied Rationality, email me (yudkowsky@gmail.com) and we may be able to meet while I’m there.

We’re still finalizing the details, but the Center For Applied Rationality may soon be running two more events:

• A weekend rationality workshop in London, UK
• A set of 4-day rationality workshops in the San Francisco Bay area, in California.

If you’d like to be kept in the loop about these events, and sent an application when applications open, please fill out this one-minute form.

And lo!  Behold the awesome new website of the Center for Applied Rationality!

Real life still slaying me.  I did manage to put out the new, British English versions of Ch. 1-17, with significant tweaks to the writing in Ch. 6, Ch. 7, and Ch. 9.  I know a lot of you will probably decide you liked the originals better.  But they were polarising chapters; and I believe, though it’s impossible to know using Fanfiction.net’s current web stats, that they were scaring away some readers.  I’m okay with driving off some readers for major reasons, but not for minor ones, and it’s quite understandable to me why someone might have a conditioned pain response to songs in fanfiction.

I have completed the scene-by-scene plot of the next arc, working in Scrivener for the first time.  I do still need to review that plot; detail it to the sub-scene level; check tension levels, goals/resolutions, character conflicts, etcetera; but hopefully – this is the hypothesis being tested – once all that is done, the actual writing should go fast.  The current layout has the next arc carrying to Ch. 91, though I suspect at least one of those “chapters” will break in half.

There’s some substantial loads of new fan-art but I’m afraid I don’t even have time to list them out in this update.

I hope to have better news for you next time.  Just please remember, it took J. K. Rowling, literally, 10 years and 21 days to publish the entire Harry Potter series; and there has been progress on the next arc, it’s just slow progress.  This is still going faster than “real” books usually come out.

Much thanks go to all the contributors of the HPMOR Ch. 1-37 Britpick Thread on the r/HPMOR subreddit, with special gratitude to noking for compiling all the suggestions into a single page – this was tremendously helpful in executing the changes.

Next Progress Update on August 1st, 2012 at 10pm Pacific Time.

And then there was the failure of my Buffalo Terastation Pro II, followed by literal smoke coming out of my other drive.  As of yesterday night and $60 worth of SATA-to-USB converters and a crazy amount of work getting mdadm to read my degraded RAID-5 array, I am successfully reading off data into my nice new simple RAID-1 mirrored drive.  Word to the wise:  Don’t buy Buffalo Terastations, and don’t trust RAID-5.  (All this would have been a hell of a lot more inconvenient if I hadn’t already put all my active works-in-progress into Dropbox.  Dropbox is awesome.)

The upshot is that I’m just now getting back to HPMOR, literally yesterday.  And since people have started trying to make printed books of HPMOR – which I neither permit nor deny, but accept as inevitable regardless – I figure I’d better get around sooner rather than later to some intended revisions to the earlier chapters…

No!  Don’t panic!  This isn’t a rewrite, just a few revisions.  Ch. 1-20 have some stylistic and character inconsistencies with the later chapters; they were written before everyone’s personality had settled down more firmly in my mind, and there are some basic writing errors I now know how to correct.  Yesterday I revised Ch. 1-4 on FF.net, and if you don’t see any visible alterations it’s because the changes were pretty minor.  6, 7, and 9 are the main chapters that might require larger revisions, and I expect there to be some controversy.

Today I got to Ch. 5 (again minor alterations only) and am, at this instant, almost done with Ch. 6, which was the first chapter to require major repair.  One section of the chapter had Mood Whiplash – tension rising too quickly, with insufficient warning – which I think I’ve now repaired mostly.  The deeper problem in Ch. 6 is that Harry’s conflict with Professor McGonagall looks too much like a victory – it is a major flaw of Methods that Harry doesn’t lose hard until Ch. 10, so he must at least not win too much before then.  That’s the part I’m working on at this very instant.

Tomorrow I hope to get to Ch. 7 and Ch. 9.  In Ch. 7, the Harry-and-Draco conversation needs to be toned down even further because multiple parents have announced their intention to have their children read this fanfic – and I know that revision is going to be controversial, but Draco’s current conversation is also a little out-of-character by the standards of the Draco in later chapters.  And in Ch. 9, I’m trying to decide whether to remove the Ghostbusters song entirely, or just foreshadow/explain it harder – a lot of people loved it, but a lot of people hated it, and I’m not sure HPMOR needs the extra variance.

And before anyone asks, the printed version of HPMOR that someone made briefly available on Lulu was taken down – probably due to complaints from the troll forum Dark Lord Potter; from what I can see of the chronology, the book was taken down a few moments after someone posted a Dark Lord Potter thread accusing me (it wasn’t me) of selling the book for a profit (the poster made it available at Lulu’s base cost).  This particular forum hates hates hates Methods and anything to do with it, so you can probably assume they’ll complain to any service you use to make HPMOR generally available in printed form.

I am now biting the bullet and starting on Britpicking Ch. 1-37 – trying to eliminate Americanisms from the test.  See the just-launched Official Britpick Thread on /r/HPMOR.  Please note that after some bad prior experiences, I am hoping for actual British readers, rather than Americans working from Internet guides, to offer their advice.  No Britpicks have been contributed yet, so assistance is much desired!

Also much desired are more Bay area test subjects for testing rationality-training units.  We’re starting to run out!  So if you’re in the Bay area and willing to be a test subject For Science! and For Rationality!, please help out!

One of the earliest funders of the Singularity Institute, Edwin Evans (literally the first person ever to support my research – for which he was made Harry’s maternal grandfather in Ch. 36 – also he serves as the Chair of the Singularity Institute) is looking for competent programmers to join the startup he cofounded, Proximiant, located in Mountain View, CA.  They’re trying to replace paper receipts, which besides saving paper and a lot of corporate accounting bureaucracy, will also allow people to do science to their spending habits in greater detail.  Your job will involve, in Edwin’s terms, “getting inanimate objects to communicate telepathically”.  They have funding and are offering competitive salaries along with early-stage startup experience.  Their jobs page is here - and tell them I sent you!

When I’m done with the early-chapter revisions – hopefully tomorrow before I officiate my next wedding – I will fire up Scrivener, the new novel-writing software I’m trying, and start work on the next HPMOR arc, possibly with an altered Ch. 85 thrown in.  (I had something different in mind for Ch. 85, but failed to write it to an acceptable level before the posting deadline; I may try again now that I’ve had a while to think about it.)  For the actual next arc I intend to try plotting out the entire arc scene-by-scene before I write it, using Scrivener’s side-notes pane.  With any luck, that will make the next arc go faster.

But (I hastily disclaim) there’s still a lot of work to be done at the Center for Applied Rationality, as it is now known, getting ready for the weeklong July minicamp, and then the August SPARC mathcamp for exceptional math talents of high school age.  I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that I am, at the moment, busier than usual.  Try not to panic; I still mean to finish what I start, and when I actually got a few moments to work on HPMOR, I was able to revise Ch. 1-6 pretty quickly.  On to Ch. 7-9 and beyond!

The next Author’s Note / progress update will be posted at hpmor.com/notes on July 1st, 2012, at 10pm Pacific Time.

“Thank you so much for writing this! My 12-year-old son used to say that he hated math, and now, after reading HPMOR for only 84 chapters he’s coming to me and asking me to explain Bayes’ Rule!” — KSVH

Speaking of which:  We’re setting up an expenses-paid week-long summer camp for 20 mathematically talented youths, of high school age (14-17), on August 6th-13th.  The focus will be on the more technical side of rationality – Bayesian statistics and such – but also teaching the same sort of mental skills as the Rationality Minicamps.  Several International Olympiad-level instructors have already volunteered to teach there.  This program will be fully subsidized, including your plane flight, for accepted attendees.  The extremely tentative name is the Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition, it will definitely be hosted at U of C Berkeley, and you can fill out a preliminary application here.

It is now too late to apply for the May 11-13 Rationality Minicamp.  If you want to attend the Minicamp in June or July, apply instantly.

The Singularity Summit 2012 will be October 13-14 in San Francisco.  Enter your email address here to be notified the moment tickets go on sale.  Our speaker lineup this year includes Steven Pinker, Vernor Vinge, Peter Thiel, Peter Norvig, Robin Hanson, and random other awesome people.

Anna Salamon would like to note that the Center for Modern Rationality (possibly to be renamed to Center for Applied Rationality, though we’re still experimentally testing names) is especially interested in job applications from anyone who’s done a lot of successful self-modification.  (We’re aware that this will probably get us a lot of applications from wacky people, but experience shows that the few people who do this successfully and sanely often have highly important contributions.)

Jay Dhyani announces that there is now a somewhat-active HPMOR subreddit, with over 100 subscribers.  ”This could be interesting,” I mused.  And if anyone has suggestions, I’d like you to comment on “What similar books / stories to HPMOR exist?” – I’m in need of better reading material.

Not to neglect the existing forums, the TV Tropes thread is up to 3,057 comments and the LessWrong Discussion thread just for Ch. 84 surpassed 1,097 comments.  (I expect there’ll be a new thread for Ch. 85 shortly, hence the link to general Discussion.)   On Fanfiction.Net, Methods is up to 17,417 reviews and 9,403,977 non-unique pageviews; and there have been 435,362 pageviews on the new version of HPMOR.com.  And on Facebook HPMOR has 2,934 “likes”, only four of which are from my Facebook friends.  I know damned well that more of you read Methods than that.

Fan art:  Tavoriel brings us a heartbreaking moment.  Nancy Hua shows us wizards shielding their eyes from the shock.  Pencil-Monkey depicts Harry vs. the Dead Duck.  Prima Donna 9396 enters Azkaban (contact me with your cameo name).  Byakubyaku imagines the dark side (ditto).  Harry and Draco appear in this sketch dump by Prite (double ditto).  On the cameo side, Ben Gutierrez cameoed as an Auror in Ch. 83; as did Josh Larios, maintainer of HPMOR.com, cameoing as Arjay Altunay.  RJL20 is his usual Internet handle – bonus points if you noticed what “Arjay Altunay” sounds like.  And Fan Tong has finally gotten her cameo, which I’d originally written for the end of Ch. 63, and then moved to Ch. 85, not dreaming how long the delay would be.

At least three of you utter lunatics went off and wrote computer programs to simulate Professor Quirrell’s horrible humming.  Jason Gross posted this MP3 recording.  Fgenj posted this YouTube recording.  GJM posted cross-platform Python code with tweakable parameters.  Incidentally, I actually do practice humming that lullaby horribly out of tune, as a way to torture my girlfriend Erin.

I’ve eliminated the “distant cry” from Ch. 84 – it was based on a projected part of Ch. 85 that I couldn’t seem to make work out right.  As a result, Ch. 85 is shorter than I’d planned. I may add that part back in later, if I can ever get it to work.

As the next arc is set immediately after this one and will take time to write, we’re probably entering a bit of an interregnum now.  My current plan is to post progress updates in the Author’s Notes on the 1st day of every month, starting June 1st, because I plan to spend from now until May 11th focusing on getting ready for the first Minicamp.  After that, I intend to try writing the next set of updates using Scrivener, which looks like it might be a huge improvement on Word; I’ll keep you posted on how that works out.

While you’re waiting, I commend to you the ongoing series Dungeon Keeper Ami by Pusakuronu, a strangely compelling read which has included some Creative Uses of Science in recent updates.  The stories Mandragora (canon!HP, short) and To The Stars (Madoka) have also recently made my Favorites section.  On the webcomic side, I’m currently going through My Little Pony: Friendship is Betrayal.  And some of you may find Alicorn’s Earthfic amusing.

And the Sequences of Less Wrong await you, as they ever do.

The next progress report will be posted to the Author’s Notes on June 1st at 10PM Pacific Time.

Harry leaned forward toward the bar of the Leaky Cauldron as best he could, though it came up to somewhere around the tips of his eyebrows. A question like that deserved his very best.

“Am I – could I be – maybe – you never know – if I’m not - but then the question is - who?”

“Bless my soul,” whispered the old bartender, “Harry Potter… what an honor.”

Harry blinked, then rallied. “Well, yes, you’re very perceptive; most people don’t realize that quite so quickly -”

“That’s enough,” Professor McGonagall said. Her hand tightened on Harry’s shoulder. “Don’t pester the boy, Tom, he’s new to all this.”

“But it is him?” quavered an old woman. “It’s Harry Potter?” With a scraping sound, she got up from her chair.

“Doris -” McGonagall said warningly. The glare she shot around the room should have been enough to intimidate anyone.

“I only want to shake his hand,” the woman whispered. She bent low and stuck out a wrinkled hand, which Harry, feeling confused and more uncomfortable than he ever had in his life, carefully shook. Tears fell from the woman’s eyes onto their clasped hands. “My granson was an Auror,” she whispered to him. “Died in seventy-nine. Thank you, Harry Potter. Thank heavens for you.”

“You’re welcome,” Harry said, entirely on automatic, and then turned his head and shot McGonagall a terrified, pleading look.

McGonagall slammed her foot down just as the general rush was about to start. It made a noise that gave Harry a new referent for the phrase “Crack of Doom”, and everyone froze in place.

“We’re in a hurry,” said McGonagall in a voice that sounded perfectly, utterly normal.

They left the bar without any trouble.

“McGonagall?” Harry said, once they were in the courtyard. He had meant to ask what was going on, but oddly found himself asking an entirely different question instead. “Who was the pale man? The man in the bar with the twitching eye?”

“Hm?” McGonagall said, sounding a bit surprised; perhaps she hadn’t expected that question either. “That was Professor Quirrell. He’ll be teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts this year at Hogwarts.”

“I had the strangest feeling that I knew him…” Harry rubbed his forehead. “And that I shouldn’t ought to shake his hand.” Like meeting someone who had been a friend, once, before something went drastically wrong… that wasn’t really it at all, but Harry couldn’t find words. “And the rest of it?”

McGonagall gave him an odd glance. “Mr. Potter… do you know… how much have you been told… about how your parents died?”

Harry returned a steady look. “My parents are alive and well, and they always refused to talk to me about how my genetic parents died. From which I infer that it wasn’t good.”

“An admirable loyalty,” said McGonagall. Her voice went low. “Though it hurts a little to hear you say it like that. Lily and James were friends of mine.”

Harry looked away, suddenly ashamed. “I’m sorry,” he said in a small voice. “But I have a Mum and Dad. And I know that I’d just make myself unhappy by comparing that reality to… something perfect that I built up in my imagination.”

“That is amazingly wise of you,” McGonagall said quietly. “But your genetic parents died very well indeed, protecting you.”

Protecting me?

Something strange clutched at Harry’s heart. “What… did happen?”

McGonagall sighed. Her wand tapped Harry’s forehead, and his vision blurred for a moment. “Something of a disguise,” McGonagall said, “so that this doesn’t happen again, not until you’re ready.” Then her wand licked out again, and tapped three times on a brick wall…

…which hollowed into a hole, and dilated and expanded and shivered into a huge archway, revealing a long row of shops with signs advertising cauldrons and dragon livers.

Harry didn’t blink. It wasn’t like anyone was turning into a cat.

And they walked forward, together, into the wizarding world.

There were merchants hawking Bounce Boots (“Made with real Flubber!”) and “Knives +3! Forks +2! Spoons with a +4 bonus!” There were goggles that would turn anything you looked at green, and a lineup of cushy lounge chairs with ejection seats for emergencies.

Harry’s head kept rotating, rotating like it was trying to screw itself off his neck. It was like walking through the magical items section of an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebook (he didn’t play the game, but he did enjoy reading the rulebooks). Harry desperately didn’t want to miss a single item for sale, in case it was one of the three you needed to complete the cycle of infinite wish spells.

Then Harry spotted something that made him, entirely without thinking, veer off from McGonagall and start heading straight into the store, a front of blue bricks with bronze-metal trim. He was brought back to reality only when McGonagall stepped right in front of him.

“Mr. Potter?” she said.

Harry blinked, then realized what he’d just done. “I’m sorry! I forgot for a moment that I was with you instead of my family.” Harry gestured at the store window, which displayed fiery letters that shone piercingly bright and yet remote, spelling out Bigbam’s Brilliant Books. “When you walk past a bookstore you haven’t visited before, you have to go in and look around. That’s the family rule.”

“That is the most Ravenclaw thing I have ever heard.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Mr. Potter, our first step is to visit Gringotts, the bank of the wizarding world. Your genetic family vault is there, with the inheritance your genetic parents left you, and you’ll need money for school supplies.” She sighed. “And, I suppose, a certain amount of spending money for books could be excused as well. Though you might want to hold off for a time. Hogwarts has quite a large library on magical subjects. And the tower in which, I strongly suspect, you will be living, has a more broad-ranging library of its own. Any book you bought now would probably be a duplicate.”

Harry nodded, and they walked on.

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great distraction,” Harry said as his head kept swiveling, “probably the best distraction anyone has ever tried on me, but don’t think I’ve forgotten about our pending discussion.”

McGonagall sighed. “Your parents – or your mother at any rate – may have been very wise not to tell you.”

“So you wish that I could continue in blissful ignorance? There is a certain flaw in that plan, Professor McGonagall.”

“I suppose it would be rather pointless,” the witch said tightly, “when anyone on the street could tell you the story. Very well.”

And she told him of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, the Dark Lord, Voldemort.

“Voldemort?” Harry whispered. It should have been funny, but it wasn’t. The name burned with a cold feeling, ruthlessness, diamond clarity, a hammer of pure titanium descending upon an anvil of yielding flesh. A chill swept over Harry even as he pronounced the word, and he resolved then and there to use safer terms like You-Know-Who.

The Dark Lord had raged upon wizarding Britain like a wilding wolf, tearing and rending at the fabric of their everyday lives. Other countries had wrung their hands but hesitated to intervene, whether out of apathetic selfishness or simple fear, for whichever was first among them to oppose the Dark Lord, their peace would be the next target of his terror.

(The bystander effect, thought Harry, thinking of Latane and Darley’s experiment which had shown that you were more likely to get help if you had an epileptic fit in front of one person than in front of three. Diffusion of responsibility, everyone hoping that someone else would go first.)

The Death Eaters had followed in the Dark Lord’s wake and in his vanguard, carrion vultures to pick at wounds, or snakes to bite and weaken. The Death Eaters were not as terrible as the Dark Lord, but they were terrible, and they were many. And the Death Eaters wielded more than wands; there was wealth within those masked ranks, and political power, and secrets held in blackmail, to paralyze a society trying to protect itself.

An old and respected journalist, Yermy Wibble, called for increased taxes and a draft. He shouted that it was absurd for the many to cower in fear of the few. His skin, only his skin, had been found nailed to the newsroom wall that next morning, next to the skins of his wife and two daughters. Everyone wished for something more to be done, and no one dared take the lead to propose it. Whoever stood out the most became the next example.

Until the names of James and Lily Potter rose to the top of that list.

And those two might have died with their wands in their hands and not regretted their choices, for they were heroes; but for that they had an infant child, their son, Harry Potter.

Tears were coming into Harry’s eyes. He wiped them away in anger or maybe desperation, I didn’t know those people, not really, they aren’t my parents now, it would be pointless to feel so sad for them -

When Harry was done sobbing into McGonagall’s robes, he looked up, and felt a little bit better to see tears in McGonagall’s eyes as well.

“So what happened?” Harry said, his voice trembling.

“The Dark Lord came to Godric’s Hollow,” said McGonagall in a whisper. “You should have been hidden, but you were betrayed. The Dark Lord killed James, and he killed Lily, and he came in the end to you, to your crib. He cast the Killing Curse at you. And that was where it ended. The Killing Curse is formed of pure hate, and strikes directly at the soul, severing it from the body. It cannot be blocked. The only defense is not to be there. But you survived. You are the only person ever to survive. The Killing Curse reflected and rebounded and struck the Dark Lord, leaving only the burnt hulk of his body and a scar on your forehead. That was the end of the terror, and we were free. That, Harry Potter, is why people want to see the scar on your forehead, and why they want to shake your hand.”

The storm of weeping that had washed through Harry had used up all his tears; he could not cry again, he was done.

(And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry’s art to notice that tiny note, but he was distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.)

Harry detached himself from McGonagall’s side. “I’ll – have to think about this,” he said, trying to keep his voice under control. He stared at his shoes. “Um. You can go ahead and call them my parents, if you want, you don’t have to say ‘genetic parents’ or anything. I guess there’s no reason I can’t have two mothers and two fathers.”

There was no sound from McGonagall.

And they walked together in silence, until they came before a great white building with vast bronze doors.

“Gringotts,” said McGonagall.

“Now, just to be clear,” Harry said, “if the professor does levitate you, Dad, when you know you haven’t been attached to any wires, that’s going to be sufficient evidence. You’re not going to turn around and say that it’s a magician’s trick. That wouldn’t be fair play. If you feel that way, you should say so now, and we can figure out a different experiment instead.”

Harry’s father, Professor Michael Verres-Evans, rolled his eyes. “Yes, Harry.”

“And you, Mum, your theory says that the professor should be able to do this, and if that doesn’t happen, you’ll admit you’re mistaken. Nothing about how magic doesn’t work when people are skeptical of it, or anything like that.”

Deputy Headmistress Minerva McGonagall was watching Harry with a bemused expression. She looked quite witchy in her black robes and pointed hat, but when she spoke she sounded formal and Scottish, which didn’t go together with the look at all. At first glance she looked like someone who ought to cackle and put babies into cauldrons, but the whole effect was ruined as soon as she opened her mouth. “Is that sufficient, Mr. Potter?” she said. “Shall I go ahead and demonstrate?”

“Sufficient? Probably not,” Harry said. “But at least it will help. Go ahead, Deputy Headmistress.”

“Just Professor will do,” said she, and then, “Wingardium Leviosa.”

Harry looked at his father.

“Huh,” Harry said.

His father looked back at him. “Huh,” his father echoed.

Then Professor Verres-Evans looked back at Professor McGonagall. “All right, you can put me down now.”

His father was lowered carefully to the ground.

Harry ruffled a hand through his own hair. Maybe it was just that strange part of him which had already been convinced, but… “That’s a bit of an anticlimax,” Harry said. “You’d think there’d be some kind of more dramatic mental event associated with updating on an observation of infinitesimal probability -” Harry stopped himself. Mum, McGonagall, and even his Dad were giving him that look again. “I mean, with finding out that everything I believe is false.”

Seriously, it should have been more dramatic. His brain ought to have been flushing its entire current stock of hypotheses about the universe, none of which allowed this to happen. But instead his brain just seemed to be going, All right, I saw the Hogwarts professor wave her wand and make your father rise into the air, now what?

The witch-lady was smiling upon them and looking quite amused. “Would you like a further demonstration, Mr. Potter?”

“You don’t have to,” Harry said. “We’ve performed a definitive experiment. But…” Harry hesitated. He couldn’t help himself. Actually, under the circumstances, he shouldn’t be helping himself. It was right and proper to be curious. “What else can you do?”

Professor McGonagall turned into a cat.

Harry scrambled back unthinkingly, backpedaling so fast that he tripped over a stray stack of books and landed hard on his bottom with a thwack. His hands came down to catch himself without quite reaching properly, and there was a warning twinge in his shoulder as the weight came down unbraced.

At once the small tabby cat morphed back up into a robed woman. “I’m sorry, Mr. Potter,” McGonagall said, sounding sincere, though her lips were twitching toward a smile. “I should have warned you.”

Harry was breathing in short pants. His voice came out choked. “You can’t DO that!”

“It’s only a Transfiguration,” said McGonagall. “An Animagus transformation, to be exact.”

“You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That’s not just an arbitrary rule, it’s implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signaling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can’t just visualize a whole cat’s anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about theneurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?”

McGonagall’s lips were twitching harder now. “Magic.”

“Magic isn’t enough to do that! You’d have to be a god!”

McGonagall blinked. “That’s the first time I’ve ever been called that.”

A blur was coming over Harry’s vision, as his brain started to comprehend what had just broken. The whole idea of a unified universe with mathematically regular laws, that was what had been flushed down the toilet; the whole notion of physics. Three thousand years of resolving big complicated things into smaller pieces, discovering that the music of the planets was the same tune as a falling apple, finding that the true laws were perfectly universal and had no exceptions anywhere and took the form of simple math governing the smallest parts,not to mention that the mind was the brain and the brain was made of neurons, a brain was what a person was -

And then a woman turned into a cat, so much for all that.

A hundred questions fought for priority over Harry’s lips and the winner poured out: “And, and what kind of incantation is Wingardium Leviosa? Who invents the words to these spells, preschool children?”

“That will do, Mr. Potter,” McGonagall said crisply, though her eyes shone with suppressed amusement. “If you wish to learn about magic, I suggest that we finalize the paperwork so that you can attend Hogwarts.”

“Right,” Harry said, somewhat dazed. He pulled his thoughts together. The March of Reason would just have to start over, that was all; they still had the experimental method and that was the important thing. “How do I get to Hogwarts, then?”

A choked laugh escaped McGonagall, as if extracted from her by tweezers.

“Hold on a moment, Harry,” his father said. “Remember why you haven’t been attending school up until now? What about your condition?”

McGonagall spun to face Michael. “His condition? What’s this?”

“I don’t sleep right,” Harry said. He waved his hands helplessly. “My sleep cycle is twenty-six hours long, I always go to sleep two hours later, every day. I can’t fall asleep any earlier than that, and then the next day I go to sleep two hours later than that. 10PM, 12AM, 2AM, 4AM, until it goes around the clock. Even if I try to wake up early, it makes no difference and I’m a wreck that whole day. That’s why I haven’t been attending a regular school up until now.”

“One of the reasons,” said his mother. Harry shot her a glare.

McGonagall gave a long hmmmmm. ”I can’t recall hearing about such a condition before…” she said slowly. “I’ll check with Madam Pomfrey to see if she knows any remedies.” Then her face brightened. “No, I’m sure this won’t be a problem – I’ll find a solution one way or another. Now,” and her gaze sharpened again, “what are these other reasons?”

Harry sent his parents a glare. “I am a conscientious objector to the child draft, on the grounds that I should not have to suffer for a continually disintegrating school system’s abject failure to provide teachers or study materials of even minimally adequate quality.”

Both of Harry’s parents howled with laughter at that, like they thought it was all a big joke. “Oh,” said Harry’s father, eyes bright, “is that why you bit a math teacher in third year.”

“She didn’t know what a logarithm was!”

“Of course,” seconded Harry’s mother. “Biting her was a very mature response to that.”

Harry’s father nodded. “A well-considered policy for solving the general problem of teachers who don’t understand logarithms.”

“I was seven years old! How long are you going to keep on bringing that up?”

“I know,” said his mother sympathetically, “you bite one math teacher and they never let you forget it, do they?”

Harry turned to McGonagall. “There! You see what I have to deal with?”

“Excuse me,” said Petunia, and fled through the screen door onto the outside porch, from which her screams of laughter were quite clearly audible.

“There, ah, there,” McGonagall seemed to be having trouble speaking for some reason, “there is to be no biting of teachers at Hogwarts, is that very clear, Mr. Potter?”

Harry scowled at her. “Fine, I won’t bite anyone who doesn’t bite me first.”

Professor Michael Verres-Evans also had to leave the room briefly upon hearing that.

“Well,” McGonagall sighed, after Harry’s parents had composed themselves and returned. “Well. I think, under the circumstances, that I should avoid taking you to purchase your study materials until a day or two before school begins.”

“What? Why? The other children already know magic, don’t they? I have to start catching up right away!”

“Rest assured, Mr. Potter,” replied Professor McGonagall, “Hogwarts is quite capable of teaching the basics. And I suspect, Mr. Potter, that if I leave you alone for two months with your schoolbooks, even without a wand, I will return to this house only to find a crater billowing purple smoke, a depopulated city surrounding it and a plague of flaming zebras terrorizing what remains of England.”

Harry’s mother and father nodded in perfect unison.

“Mum! Dad!”

Every inch of wall space is covered by a bookcase. Each bookcase has six shelves, going almost to the ceiling. Some bookshelves are stacked to the brim with hardcover books: science, mathematics, history, and everything else. Other shelves have two layers of paperback science fiction, with the back layer of books propped up on old tissue boxes or two-by-fours, so that you can see the back layer of books above the books in front. And it still isn’t enough. Books are overflowing onto the tables and the sofas and making little heaps under the windows.

This is the living-room of the house occupied by the eminent Professor Michael Verres-Evans, and his wife, Mrs. Petunia Evans-Verres, and their adopted son, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres.

There is a letter lying on the living-room table, and an unstamped envelope of yellowish parchment, addressed to Mr. H. Potter in emerald-green ink.

The Professor and his wife are speaking sharply at each other, but they are not shouting. The Professor considers shouting to be uncivilized.

“You’re joking,” Michael said to Petunia. His tone indicated that he was very much afraid that she was serious.

“My sister was a witch,” Petunia repeated. She looked frightened, but stood her ground. “Her husband was a wizard.”

“This is absurd!” Michael said sharply. “They were at our wedding – they visited for Christmas -”

“I told them you weren’t to know,” Petunia whispered. “But it’s true. I’ve seen things -”

The Professor rolled his eyes. “Dear, I understand that you’re not familiar with the skeptical literature. You may not realize how easy it is for a trained magician to fake the seemingly impossible. Remember how I taught Harry to bend spoons? If it seemed like they could always guess what you were thinking, that’s called cold reading -”

“It wasn’t bending spoons -”

“What was it, then?”

Petunia bit her lip. “I can’t just tell you. You’ll think I’m -” She swallowed. “Listen. Michael. I wasn’t – always like this -” She gestured at herself, as though to indicate her lithe form. “Lily did this. Because I – because I begged her. For years, I begged her. Lily had always been prettier than me, and I’d… been mean to her, because of that, and then she got magic, can you imagine how I felt? 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. And when I had just graduated, I was going out with this boy, Vernon Dursley, he was fat and he was the only boy who would talk to me in college. And he said he wanted children, and that his first son would be named Dudley. And I thought to myself,what kind of parent names their child Dudley Dursley? It was like I saw my whole future life stretching out in front of me, and I couldn’t stand it. And I wrote to my sister and told her that if she didn’t help me I’d rather just -”

Petunia stopped.

“Anyway,” Petunia said, her voice small, “she gave in. She told me it was dangerous, and I said I didn’t care any more, and I drank this potion and I was sick for weeks, but when I got better my skin cleared up and I finally filled out and… I was beautiful, people were nice to me,” her voice broke, “and after that I couldn’t hate my sister any more, especially when I learned what her magic brought her in the end -”

“Darling,” Michael said gently, “you got sick, you gained some weight while resting in bed, and your skin cleared up on its own. Or being sick made you change your diet -”

“She was a witch,” Petunia repeated. “I saw it.”

“Petunia,” Michael said. The annoyance was creeping into his voice. “You know that can’t be true. Do I really have to explain why?”

Petunia wrung her hands. She seemed to be on the verge of tears. “My love, I know I can’t win arguments with you, but please, you have to trust me on this -”

“Dad! Mum!”

The two of them stopped and looked at Harry as though they’d forgotten there was a third person in the room.

Harry took a deep breath. “Mum, your parents didn’t have magic, did they?”

“No,” Petunia said, looking puzzled.

“Then no one in your family knew about magic when Lily got her letter. How did they get convinced?”

“Ah…” Petunia said. “They didn’t just send a letter. They sent a professor from Hogwarts. He -” Petunia’s eyes flicked to Michael. “He showed us some magic.”

“Then you don’t have to fight over this,” Harry said firmly. Hoping against hope that this time, just this once, they would listen to him. “If it’s true, we can just get a Hogwarts professor here and see the magic for ourselves, and Dad will admit that it’s true. And if not, then Mum will admit that it’s false. That’s what the experimental method is for, so that we don’t have to resolve things just by arguing.”

The Professor turned and looked down at him, dismissive as usual. “Oh, come now, Harry. Really, magic? I thought you’d know better than to take this seriously, son, even if you’re only ten. Magic is just about the most unscientific thing there is!”

Harry’s mouth twisted bitterly. He was treated well, probably better than most genetic fathers treated their own children. Harry had been sent to the best elementary schools – and when that didn’t work out, he was provided with tutors from the endless labor pool of starving students. Always Harry had been encouraged to study whatever caught his attention, bought all the books that caught his fancy, sponsored in whatever math or science competitions he entered. He was given anything reasonable that he wanted, except, maybe, the slightest shred of respect. A tenured Professor who taught biochemistry at Oxford could hardly be expected to listen to the advice of a little boy. You would listen to Show Interest, of course; that’s what a Good Parent would do, and so, if you conceived of yourself as a Good Parent, you would do it. But take a ten-year-old seriously? Hardly.

Sometimes Harry wanted to scream at his father.

“Mum,” Harry said. “If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There’s a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation – that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um… I can’t think offhand of where to find something about how it’s an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of arguments -”

His mother looked down at him and smiled. “Thank you, Harry. But -” her head rose back up to stare at her husband. “I don’t want to win an argument with your father. I want my husband to, to listen to his wife who loves him, and trust her just this once -”

Harry closed his eyes briefly. Hopeless. Both of his parents were just hopeless.

Now his parents were getting into one of those arguments again, one where his mother tried to make his father feel guilty, and his father tried to make his mother feel stupid.

“I’m going to go to my room,” Harry announced. His voice trembled a little. “Please try not to fight too much about this, Mum, Dad, we’ll know soon enough how it comes out, right?”

“Of course, Harry,” said his father, and his mother gave him a reassuring kiss, and then they went on fighting while Harry climbed the stairs to his bedroom.

He shut the door behind him and tried to think.

The funny thing was, he ought to have agreed with Dad. No one had ever seen any evidence of magic, and according to Mum, there was a whole magical world out there. How could anyone keep something like that a secret? More magic? That seemed like a rather suspicious sort of excuse.

It ought to have been an open-and-shut case for Mum joking, lying or being insane, in ascending order of awfulness. If Mum had sent the letter herself, that would explain how it arrived at the letterbox without a stamp. A little insanity was far, far less improbable than the universe really working like that.

Except that some part of Harry was utterly convinced that magic was real, and had been since the instant he saw the putative letter from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Harry rubbed his forehead, grimacing. Don’t believe everything you think, one of his books had said.

But this bizarre certainty… Harry was finding himself just expecting that, yes, a Hogwarts professor would show up and wave a wand and magic would come out. The strange certainty was making no effort to guard itself against falsification – wasn’t making excuses in advance for why there wouldn’t be a professor, or the professor would only be able to bend spoons.

Where do you come from, strange little prediction? Harry directed the thought at his brain.Why do I believe what I believe?

Usually Harry was pretty good at answering that question, but in this particular case, he had no clue what his brain was thinking.

Harry gave a mental shrug to himself. A flat metal plate on a door affords pushing, and a handle on a door affords pulling, and the thing to do with a testable hypothesis is to go test it.

He took a piece of lined paper from his desk, and started writing.

Dear Deputy Headmistress

Harry paused, reflecting; then discarded the paper for another, tapping another millimeter of graphite from his mechanical pencil. This called for careful calligraphy.

Dear Deputy Headmistress Minerva McGonagall,

Or Whomsoever It May Concern:

I recently received your letter of acceptance to Hogwarts, addressed to Mr. H. Potter. You may not be aware that my genetic parents, James Potter and Lily Potter (formerly Lily Evans) are dead. I was adopted by Lily’s sister, Petunia Evans-Verres, and her husband, Michael Verres-Evans.

I am extremely interested in attending Hogwarts, conditional on such a place actually existing. Only my mother Petunia says she knows about magic, and she can’t use it herself. My father is highly skeptical. I myself am uncertain. I also don’t know where to obtain any of the books or equipment listed in your acceptance letter.

Mother mentioned that you sent a Hogwarts representative to Lily Potter (then Lily Evans) in order to demonstrate to her family that magic was real, and, I presume, help Lily obtain her school materials. If you could do this for my own family it would be extremely helpful.

Sincerely,

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres.

Harry added their current address, then folded up the letter and put it in an envelope, which he addressed to Hogwarts. Further consideration led him to obtain a candle and drip wax onto the flap of the envelope, into which, using a penknife’s tip, he impressed the initials H.J.P.E.V. If he was going to descend into this madness, he was going to do it with style.

Then he opened his door and went back downstairs. His father was sitting in the living-room and reading a book of higher math to show how smart he was; and his mother was in the kitchen preparing one of his father’s favorite dishes to show how loving she was. It didn’t look like they were talking to one another at all. As scary as arguments could be, not arguingwas somehow much worse.

“Mum,” Harry said into the unnerving silence, “I’m going to test the hypothesis. According to your theory, how do I send an owl to Hogwarts?”

His mother turned from the kitchen sink to stare at him, looking shocked. “I – I don’t know, I think you just have to own a magic owl.”

That should’ve sounded highly suspicious, oh, so there’s no way to test your theory then, but the peculiar certainty in Harry seemed willing to stick its neck out even further.

“Well, the letter got here somehow,” Harry said, “so I’ll just wave it around outside and call ‘letter for Hogwarts!’ and see if an owl picks it up. Dad, do you want to come watch?”

His father shook his head minutely and kept on reading. Of course, Harry thought to himself. Magic was a disgraceful thing that only stupid people believed in; if his father went so far as to test the hypothesis, or even watch it being tested, that would feel like associating himself with that…

Only as Harry stumped out the back door, into the backyard, did it occur to him that if an owl did come down and snatch the letter, he was going to have some trouble telling Dad about it.

But – well – that can’t really happen, can it? No matter what my brain seems to believe. If an owl really comes down and grabs this envelope, I’m going to have worries a lot more important than what Dad thinks.

Harry took a deep breath, and raised the envelope into the air.

He swallowed.

Calling out Letter for Hogwarts! while holding an envelope high in the air in the middle of your own backyard was… actually pretty embarrassing, now that he thought about it.

No. I’m better than Dad. I will use the scientific method even if it makes me feel stupid.

“Letter -” Harry said, but it actually came out as more of a whispered croak.

Harry steeled his will, and shouted into the empty sky, “Letter for Hogwarts! Can I get an owl here?”

“Harry?” asked a bemused woman’s voice, one of the neighbors.

Harry pulled down his hand like it was on fire and hid the envelope behind his back like it was drug money. His whole face was hot with shame.

An old woman’s face peered out from above the neighboring fence, grizzled grey hair escaping from her hairnet. Mrs. Figg, the occasional babysitter. “What are you doing, Harry?”

“Nothing,” Harry said in a strangled voice. “Just – testing a really silly theory -”

“Did you get your acceptance letter from Hogwarts?”

Harry froze in place.

“Yes,” Harry’s lips said a little while later. “I got a letter from Hogwarts. They say they want my owl by July 31st, but -”

“But you don’t have an owl. Poor dear! I can’t imagine what someone must have been thinking, sending you just the standard letter.”

A wrinkled arm stretched out over the fence, and opened an expectant hand. Hardly even thinking at this point, Harry gave over his envelope.

“Just leave it to me, dear,” said Mrs. Figg, “and in a jiffy or two I’ll have someone over.”

And her face disappeared from over the fence.

There was a long silence in the backyard.

Then a boy’s voice said, calmly and quietly, “What.”

New fan art:  Karen Dutton brings us that poor Dementor, HK66 (contact me with your cameo name!) brings us Mr. Crabbe and Mr. Goyle, and Chloe silhouettes the Three.  Darek says this was inspired by Quirrell’s many identities – I’m not quite counting it as fan art, but I’m linking it.  And Dinosaurusgede is baaaaaack!

Some people have been asking why I’m posting these at 1 per week.  One answer is that each posting involves a lot of last-minute editing and finalizing, so they are still tiring – the last arc’s final pace of 1 per 3 days was exhausting – and I’m trying to hold it down to one per week this time.  Ch. 83 will be a short chapter posted Wednesday (Apr 4) at 1pm, and then, since that one doesn’t really count, Ch. 84 will be posted next Tuesday (Apr 10) at 7pm.  (And Ch. 85 a week after, according to current plans; that’s the last one queued.)  Next time I may consider trying to finalize the arc further before beginning it, and then posting at a faster pace (at the price of additional delay before starting).

The Center for Modern Rationality is now accepting applications for the next set of Rationality Minicamps, the successors to the highly successful Rationality Minicamp of 2011.  Dates are May 11-13, June 22-24, and July 21-28.  These Minicamps will be planned on the assumption that attendees have read at least some of the Less Wrong Sequences, not necessarily all.  We plan to send out the first batch of acceptances soon, and applying should only take about 10-15 minutes, so please fill out the application now, especially if you prefer to attend in May.

The Center for Modern Rationality is offering $50 prizes for any suggested rationality training exercises that look good enough to test, and $500 prizes for any suggested exercises that we actually adopt into a unit.  Specific descriptions of mental skills, accompanied by the request for exercises to teach them, have been posted for the units Be Specific and Check Consequentialism.  (Think of this as trying to invent the actual content of the bizarre exercises that Harry has been inflicting on the Chaos Legion since Ch. 29… oh, wait, I haven’t mentioned those in the text yet, have I?)

Fan art:  Tavoriel brings us a wolf facing a dragon, and Lanthanum produces a small animated trailer for Quirrell’s games.  Samuel Kleiner has cameoed as Mr. Kleiner, and dtldarek has cameoed as Totoro (that request took a while to set up).

Well!  That was fun, but several readers wrote in to say that their academic performance had suffered due to obsessing about the problem.  Apparently this was finals season.  My deep apologies for that.

I was amazed that the readership collectively got almost every element of Harry’s solution, except for the monetary payment, and Harry spooking the Dementor instead of destroying it.  (Looking up Philip Tetlock’s original experiment on taboo tradeoffs, taking the definition literally instead of reaching, and then reading the relevant section of Ch. 26 while keeping in mind Conservation of Detail, might have solved the monetary part.)  This makes me worry that the actual chapter might’ve come as an anticlimax, especially with so many creative suggestions that didn’t get used.  I shall poll the Less Wrong discussants and see how they felt before I decide whether to do this again.  This was actually intended as a dry run for a later, serious “Solve this or the story ends sadly” puzzle – like I used in Part 5 of my earlier story Three Worlds Collide - but I’ll have to take the current outcome into account when deciding whether to go through with that.

One thing I did notice was that many readers (a) neglected simple solutions in favor of complex ones, (b) neglected obvious solutions in favor of nonobvious ones, and (c) suggested that the correct hints had been put there for deliberately deceptive purposes.

General announcement:  I do not lie to my readers.  Almost everything in HPMOR is generated by the underlying facts of the story. Sometimes it is generated by humor – I can’t realistically claim that comic timing that precise would occur in a purely natural magical universe. But nothing is there to deliberately fool the readers.

Methods of Rationality is a rationalist story.  Your job is to outwit the universe, not the author.  If it taught the lesson that the simple solution is always wrong because it is “too obvious”, it would be teaching rather the wrong moral.  There are some cases where people have scored additional points by successful literary analysis, e.g. Checkov’s Gun principles.  But the author is not your enemy, and the facts aren’t lies.

Of course there are various characters running deceptions and masquerades inside the story, but that is quite a different matter.

Anyway…

My primary, Erin (cameo as Erin the Consort in Ch. 13), would like to make the following announcement:  If there are any guys in the Bay Area who like the same obscure black metal bands she does, she may be interested in some no-strings-attached dates.  She’s making this announcement here because of the insanely unreasonable difficulty of finding guys who like the same black metal she does.  Her favorite bands include:  Early Abigor, Blut Aus Nord, Horn, Falkenbach, Njiqahdda, Samael, Vintersorg, Vinterriket, Lunar Aurora, Nychts, Arckanum, and Negura Bunget.  Long hair is a plus but not mandatory.  Female fans of these bands are welcome to contact her as well.  And if you’re in the Berkeley area, she’s also looking for a hiking partner of either gender.  Email her alias here.

(Before anyone asks, yes, we’re polyamorous – I am in long-term relationships with three women, all of whom are involved with more than one guy.  Apologies in advance to any 19th-century old fogies who are offended by our more advanced culture.  Also before anyone asks: One of those is my primary who I’ve been with for 7+ years, and the other two did know my real-life identity before reading HPMOR, but HPMOR played a role in their deciding that I was interesting enough to date.)

On the fan art front, Karen Dutton brings us the incredible Phoenix’s Fate, for which artwork she was appointed Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot in Ch. 80.  Samuel Kleiner renders Harry descending into his trunk’s cavern level. Ilae shows us Harry weeping at the end of Ch. 79.  And Nathan Rehfuss depicts house elves stealing our magic.  Another cameo is by Nicodemus Capernaum, the appearance of Mike Obee Lay, who has likewise been appointed Chief Warlock.

Today’s writing tip:  In manga or in anime, seeing a character suddenly start glowing as they draw on a previously unknown power is visually impressive; we get to see it happen, which makes it plausible on some brain-level.  Watching them beat up on the enemy for five minutes after that, if done well as drawings or animation, is a feast for the eyes.  This is not how it works in writing.  Your character’s powers must be foreshadowed or they are not believable.  The battle scenes must be lawful, attack and defense proceeding according to believable rules, without sudden changes in anyone’s strength or ability (unless justified by a previously introduced mechanic).  Otherwise, all the reader sees is the chaos of a set of random attacks and defenses that succeed or fail for no discernible reason except plot.  Can you ever remember reading a book where, at the climax of the story, the protagonist pulled a new, unforeshadowed power out of nowhere?  This sometimes works as a visual spectacle in a picture, but it almost never works as writing, so for the love of the heavens stop doing it in your fanfiction.  This concludes the public service announcement.