So… my life has been rather hectic recently.  There was a huge push to get the May Minicamp units done, and now we need as many more units again for the weeklong July minicamp.  (On the plus side, the May minicamp was an overwhelming success by all the measures we tried – the units were perfected in time, everyone visibly enjoyed the hell out of it, all the participants are keeping in touch afterward, and a lot of people were tossing around words like “life-changing”, though, of course, long-term life-outcome followup tests won’t be in for a while.)  I basically put everything else aside and tried to finish up my units for the May minicamp, and then when the first Minicamp was done (on May 15th) I had to write up a rationalist wedding ceremony for two adorably-in-love rationalist friends who asked me to officiate.  (I’ll also be doing a lower-key wedding ceremony this Saturday – you know how it is, you don’t officiate any weddings for years and years, and then you have to do two in 6 days.)  Composing the ceremony used up my background-writing thoughts or a while after Minicamp, I’m afraid.

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.

Best comment on Ch. 81, by Hokuten Mage:  “When Harry Potter stares into the abyss, the abyss runs away and hides.”

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?)

Please do apply for paid consulting work at the Center for Modern Rationality, if you have abilities relevant to designing exercises to teach rationalist skills, or if you have run successful workshops before of any sort.  We haven’t gotten many such applications yet.

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.)

The Center for Modern Rationality is still looking for applications from excellent teachers (especially those who’ve been quietly experimenting on their own with better teaching methods, or those who’ve taught adults, but also anyone who’s just very good in a classroom) and executive assistants (people who can do moderately complicated work even if it is somewhat boring).  We can promise with some degree of assurance that you will learn more working for us than you could learn at almost any other job.  Don’t be shy, apply!

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.

Contents of this A/N:  About the writing; Shannon Friedman is starting up her counseling business; the Quixey programming challenge; P/S/A about programming careers; and the long-awaited fan-art update.  Sorry about the length – there’s a lot of accumulated stuff to get through!

Loserthree’s summary of key chapters.  (Within the post, these are spoilered, so highlight/select the text to reveal them.)

I was surprised, yet again, by how many people didn’t seem to hate Ch. 78, including the parts I thought were awkward – people seemed to like even Harry’s retrospective of his discovery of the work-in-work-out Potions principle, which I really thought was going to flop.  I genuinely suspect that I could write a lot faster if I could just convince my damned brain that my readers enjoy the parts I hate to write – both because I would rewrite it less, and because I would enjoy writing it more.  My brain seems to be refusing to update and is generating phrases like “But maybe everyone who hated it just isn’t saying anything,” which is in fact possible, but also seems like something of a Perfect Recovery Error – the evidence should be shifting my opinions somehow.  I shall talk to my rationalist friends about this, and see if they have any advice on reconciling my beliefs and anticipations here.

The entire Self-Actualization arc was intended to get to the point where the Wham Line that ends Ch. 78 would make sense to the reader.  There are three important lessons I learned from this, over and above the “Never recurse more than once” principle:

1)  After all the buildup of Self-Actualization, I still wasn’t at the point where I felt that the Wham Line wouldn’t have readers going “Huh?”  And then, more or less as I was writing the last Aftermath, it occurred to me to put in Hat-and-Cloak’s repeated-Obliviation of Hermione.  In principle I could’ve done this at the end of Ch. 63!  I do like the Self-Actualization arc, but…  Lesson learned:  Any setup you think you need to accomplish by a major diversionary arc can probably also be accomplished by a single event, if you can find that single event.

2)  Anything you think will be completely inexplicable to the readers, probably won’t be – they know less background info than you, so where you see a single huge missing fact you haven’t yet revealed, they see a plentiful bag of possible interpretations.  (Discovered when I compared all the reviewers’ interpretations of the Wham Line at the end of 78, to the actual interpretation revealed in 79.)  An important corollary is that anything you think won’t confuse the readers, will.

3)  The description of the breaking storm over Hogwarts at the end of Ch. 78 probably did more to make the Wham Line “fit” than the whole previous Self-Actualization arc.  Setup you think needs to be accomplished by plot events, can also just be done by atmosphere and tension in the immediate paragraphs; but this won’t be obvious when you’re trying to outline the abstract plot.

All of these are corollaries to the key lesson I’m learning as a writer – for yes, this is my first real book-length effort, and I am very much still learning – never divert.

Among the several people who suffered so that you could get your next Methods fix is Shannon Friedman (Chaotic Shannon in Ch. 78), who missed several dates with me so that I could get some writing done.  She’s starting up a counseling business, specializing in Internal Family Systems work – if she was talking to Harry, she’d try to talk to his Ravenclaw, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, Gryffindor, Internal Critic, and dark side separately, find out what they wanted, and try to negotiate a compromise that all of Harry’s parts could agree on.  (A chunk of our rationalist community, though by no means unanimously, have been evangelizing Internal Family Systems as the most effective type of counseling they’ve come across so far.)  Shannon is currently looking for new counseling clients; she’s located in the Bay Area (Mountain View) but can also do Skype video, and is charging HPMOR readers an introductory rate of $50/hour.  Click here for more.

Quixey is a startup founded by LW readers, with a fair number of HPMOR-reading employees.  They have funding and traction, are looking for top programmers, and are offering salaries competitive with what you’d get at Google.  One year out of college is fine, if you’ve got the talent and you’re a good fit for their culture.  To publicize their hiring efforts, they’re also running the Quixey Challenge – if you’re in CS at CMU or MIT, you’ve probably already heard of this – which offers $100 to anyone (in the US) who can solve a programming challenge in one minute or less.  The next Quixey Challenge is Wednesday, March 21st.  If you’re a superprogrammer, and especially if you’re interested in working for a Bay Area company with a strong rationalist culture and highly competitive salaries, give it a shot!  And if you get to the interview stage, be sure to tell them how you got there.

Public service announcement:  If you have high talent, programming is extremely easy to learn.  The way I became a programmer was by finding an old ZX81 computer with 4K of RAM and no tape drive, meaning that anytime you wanted to use a program you had to type it in from scratch, and pretty soon I was typing in my own programs.  This was at the age of 5 or 6.  This mysterious Talent doesn’t always correlate to intelligence, but if you did well at algebra and you’re currently making less than $120,000/year, consider installing Python 3, looking at some random Python programs online, and then seeing if you can write programs yourself. College majors are a highly inefficient market, with Computer Science enrollments steadily dropping, and competent programmers are in extreme demand right now – in the Bay Area, companies are paying $10-$20,000 for successful referrals.  It doesn’t require a four-year education to start getting paid to do this – if you’ve got enough Talent to learn to program just by reading code, then regardless of what other career you’ve built or costs you’ve sunk, you should definitely try your hand as a modern-day wizard.  This concludes the public service announcement.

And now, the long-awaited fanart update!

Audiovisual:  Centreoftheselights sings her original Chaos Legion Song on Youtube, and cameos as Ellie Knight in Ch. 78.

Drawn:  Cover art by Mike Obee Lay (cameo pending).  Wishcat brings us a view of Rianne Felthorne from Ch. 76 – Wishcat, please contact me with your cameo information!  Tavoriel shows us an unbearable cute image of Draco with Lucius (circa Ch. 7), and also needs to contact me with cameo info.  Sascia brings us another image beneath the stars and cameos as Sophie McJorgenson (Ch. 79).  LL depicts a boy unlike the others [1] [2] and cameos as Lurinus Lumblung.  Mad Hatter Lcarol shows us the three generals.  Stephanie shows us a declaration of war, a spit-take, and a failed experiment, and cameos as Adam Beringer and Nita Berdine in Ch. 78.  Tess Walsh (cameo in Ch. 78) shows us another starscape and a very recent Quibbler cover.  Sukamisya reminds us that it’s just a conceptual limitation, and still needs to contact me with cameo info.  And Ben Gutierrez takes us out of Azkaban the loud way.

New fan-fanfictions:  Harry Potter and the Order of Chaos & Educational by centreoftheselights, Harry Potter and the Methods of Chaos by JBean210, Dark Lord Material by Truemythewise.

Cameos in Ch. 78:  Tess Walsh as herself, Stephanie as Adam Beringer and Nita Berdine, Dylan Vaughan who did that epic cover art, the Darke Lady as a guise of Tracey Davis (it wasn’t easy figuring out how to work that name in there), Raymond Arnold of Patronus fame, centreoftheselights as Ellie Knight, Gingersnap (more about her in next A/N), and Shannon Friedman.  Cameos in Ch. 79:  Sascia as Sophie McJorgenson, LL as Lirinus Lumblung.