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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

163 points by lobo_tuerto 12y ago

sirsar 12y ago
For those put off by the first few chapters, I highly recommend you try to stick with it, or skip the first 10 chapters. This story starts out with a rather insufferable tone, but after that, it becomes a lot of fun. It's what the author calls "rational fiction", meaning that there are mysteries in it that you can solve, given enough thought (unlike most of the mystery genre).
- not_a_test_user 12y ago
  I disagree. It starts with a rather insufferable tone and then, somehow, it manages to get worse.
  - RodericDay 12y ago
    Agreed. It's great insight into what LessWrong types consider "brilliance", though, so I don't regret reading it.
    - macrael 12y ago
      I've been calling them hyper-rationalists. There's a line somewhere in the story where I think Harry is delighted to have found at Hogwarts a group of people who talk like people in novels instead of all the other people he knows from school. It's a line that resonated with me for sure but gets at some of what I don't like about this philosophy.
    - loup-vaillant 12y ago
      I on the other hand, get no insight from yours not liking hpmor. what exactly did you two found wanting, and why? This is not a challenge. I really want to know.
  - asuffield 12y ago
    If you do not value rationality and believe in the primary of the truth, you will hate it. This is not an apolitical story, it is in many ways a manifesto.
    - aaronem 12y ago
      I value a tolerable prose style. Sadly, that is not something which Mr. Yudkowsky can in honesty count among his merits, be they what they may.
    - nemo 12y ago
      I am very sure you could value rationality and still hate the writing. Terms like 'valuing rationality' or believing in the primacy of truth (I think that's what you meant) don't have universally accepted definitions. A rational person might readily find the novel to an Eliezer Yudkowsky's propaganda-novel along the lines of an Ayn Rand novel, and not find it a well written or enjoyable story. The number of parallels between Rand and Yudkowsky are really fascinating to me, Rand and Yudkowsky really seem to be birds of a feather.
      - kbenson 12y ago
        Nobody has said that if you do value truth and rationality you will like it, so I'm not really sure who you are arguing here.
        nemo 12y ago
        OP stated that a person person who did not value reason would hate the writing. I just stated the converse, that person who valued reason might easily hate the writing too.
        kbenson 12y ago
        The converse of the original statement is that if you hate the writing, you don't value rationality and truth. You didn't state the converse, you seem to have taken it as a starting point and disproved it. But nobody was arguing the converse was true, which was my point.
  - crpatino 12y ago
    On insufferability: My take is that during the first 12-15 chapters or so, LessWrong was using the context of the Potter-verse as a pretext to write about his vision on what constitutes "rationality", which may be called "Bayesianism", but I am not really sure. And YES, this part is insufferable. I found that dialogs between Harry and McGonagall were specially awful since those pushed me out of suspension of disbelief almost on a sentence by sentence basis. The history however gets better, at least in the sense that the author stops preaching through the main characters and begins to actually write a story. There are multiple ways this story may offend a portion of its readers, so it is not for every one, but strictly speaking the flow gets better after the first few chapters. Without giving spoilers away, some of the things that tend to annoy people the most are: * Whether the main character (Harry) is a mary sue or not. * The promotion or demotion of certain support characters in comparison with the canon. * The value system of the author, which keeps leaking through the whole story and may touch one sensible fiber or another from time to time. Personally, these issues do not bother me a lot. However I am aware of the shortcomings and would set the story a PG-18+ rating. While it is one of my guilty pleasures, I would not stand any of my children dwell in this kind of "rationality porn" before they have had some exposure to the real world and have pondered over some of the ethical issues that are fiercely debated in our society.
  - amalcon 12y ago
    Agreed. It started out rather insufferable, but had a good enough concept (somebody trying to figure out how magic actually works) an a good enough execution on that concept, that it was a very enjoyable read anyway. Recently, he's largely abandoned the "figure out how magic actually works" part in favor of the not terribly interesting plot and characters.
- chmullig 12y ago
  I got through chapter 10 or 12 and my hate and rage for every character didn't abate. The writing was terrible. I found it to be insufferable mental masturbation for militant atheists.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  Personally, I was introduced to the story via a link to the chapter involving experiments with a time turner to factor products of large primes, or solve any other NP-style problem whose solution is easy to check but hard to find: http://hpmor.com/chapter/17 http://hpmor.com/chapter/17 You can safely read up through the result of that experiment without any major spoilers for reading the story from the beginning. If that humor amuses you, you'll likely enjoy the rest of the story. Also, if you find characters in the first chapters insufferable, it might be worth revisiting them after getting more used to the characters via the later chapters. The "insufferability" is actually addressed in-story and in-character, with some specific reasons given for why people might react that way.
- irremediable 12y ago
  On your recommendation, I might try it again, perhaps skipping the first 10 chapters.
- zephjc 12y ago
  I actually found the earlier chapters interesting, but the whole Battle Magic arc rather tedious
MPSimmons 12y ago
Is it done yet? I refuse to read it again until it is. It has, so far, sucked in a week of my time twice, because I had to re-read all of it to remember how the new chapters came about. It's really great writing (as sirsar says, after a while) - at least, I enjoyed it. But it does keep going well after you think it would.
- nbouscal 12y ago
  Not yet. He's working on the last set of updates, and is hoping to be done by the end of the year.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
There's also a well-done podcast version at http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/ http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/ . (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053802)
StavrosK 12y ago
I love this, it is one of the best things I've read, and I think it made me a better person by changing the way I think. Here's an ebook version I made: https://leanpub.com/hpmor https://leanpub.com/hpmor It should be mostly-current (I'll update it again now).
zyxley 12y ago
MoR? Bleh. It's basically a half-inch away from a self-insert story, with every Doylist weakness in the narrative brutally exploited in a Watsonian manner and every other character made into a drooling moron so that Harry can be a genius by comparison. I much prefer stories like Applied Cultural Anthropology, which takes the informed attributes of characters and runs with them to better flesh out the background and to give every character, including the villains, more Doylist competence. Edit: link is https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9238861/1/Applied-Cultural-Anthropology-or https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9238861/1/Applied-Cultural-Anth... (thanks, Groxx)
- Groxx 12y ago
  I'll have to check that one out, thanks! Link for others (and for verification, but I think it's right): https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9238861/1/Applied-Cultural-Anthropology-or https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9238861/1/Applied-Cultural-Anth...
- Albuca 12y ago
  Do you have a link you could share?
- zephjc 12y ago
  I don't think that's a fair analysis of the characters as the story progresses (except maybe for Ron, but who likes Ron anyway?) How far into HPMOR did you get?
  - nikbackm 12y ago
    I haven't read much of this, but I recall a scene where Dumbledore was portrayed in a very unflattering light at least. (Something about trying to avoid dying I think)
    - crpatino 12y ago
      Yeah, I did not like that one either. Though claiming that Dumbledore is portrayed as a "drooling moron" there (or anywhere else for the matter) is not precisely correct.
Indyan 12y ago
I'm a fan of this fanfic. I gave up due to the glacial pace of updates. But, this fanfic has been discussed on HN several times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2429034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2429034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385932
mcguire 12y ago
"'I don't see why it wouldn't be,' Harry said. 'A buckytube is just a graphite sheet wrapped into a circular tube, basically, and graphite is the same stuff used in pencils -'" Well, technically....
- sp332 12y ago
  They're naturally occurring in soot http://www.azonano.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1782 http://www.azonano.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1782 and I suppose pencil lead as well.
  - mcguire 12y ago
    Graphite is used in pencils by being mixed with clay and compressed, then heated in a kiln. It's essentially a ceramic. Diamonds, pure graphite, buckminsterfullerenes, etc., are pure carbon.
anatoly 12y ago
Worm by Wildbow is also very much worth a try: http://parahumans.wordpress.com/ http://parahumans.wordpress.com/ Not a fan fiction, like HPMoR, but rather a lengthy novel about superheroes and supervillains that takes the subject seriously and with an incredible amount of inventiveness. It may sound lame, but just try it for a chapter or two.
- DanAndersen 12y ago
  Seconding this one. I still haven't finished yet (on chapter 21/30 so far) but I've been quite impressed with it. I will say that it's important to get past the first couple sections, as the "high school" setting initially didn't grab me, but once it got into the world of capes it captured my attention. It's just nice to have characters that actually think things through and don't fall for the typical tropes of the genre.
  - anatoly 12y ago
    I was undecided about it right up until the big fight with the big L in one of the early chapters. That was so emotionally captivating, so epic and detail-rich at the same time, I was just walking around in disbelief afterwards going "What the hell did I just read?! How... but how...?!"
    - hollerith 12y ago
      >the big fight with the big L If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to know what chapter (the beginning of) that is in.
      - CocaKoala 12y ago
        I don't know what they mean by "The Big L", but the first MAJOR fight against an unstoppable opponent begins in Chapter 8. edit: Oh, as soon as I posted I realized what they meant by L. WHOOPS.
      - anatoly 12y ago
        It's chapter 8 (or "arc" 8 as the author calls it).
imranq 12y ago
Reminds me of Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby...another story-driven "technical" book. I imagine if all my technical books were written like that, I'd quickly have to check in to a mental institution.
Houshalter 12y ago
People seem to either love this book or vocally hate it with passion. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground, or at least those people never speak up.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  I don't find it appealing and haven't read much of it (I was aware of it prior to this post). Does that count?
- erichocean 12y ago
  I suspect it's because the world itself breaks along those lines. It's a bit like how Republicans and Democrats look to a non-statist a hell of a lot like how Protestants and Catholics look to an atheist: they agree on far, far more fundamental things than their actual disagreements, which are mostly at the edges, not at the core. Similarly, whenever Randian-style "reason" is promoted as it is in Methods (to a degree), the world breaks strongly on people who really, REALLY like that sort of thing, and people who truly, absolutely hate it with a passion. (Funny anecdote: a friend of ours in college—a mild, sweet, good-tempered female—tried to read Any Rand's "Anthem" in the school library one day and physically threw the book against the wall she was so upset by it!)
  - saraid216 12y ago
    Actually, I like the Harry Potter takedowns he does, but I find the zomgrationality bits boring and just skip the preaching. As fanfiction, it is surprisingly good prose. But you know, it's still fanfiction, namely Harry Potter fanfiction, and thus has trouble actually rising above that. I like Darths and Droids for the same reason.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      I think that the divide might stem from the fact that initially, HPMOR was mostly "zomgrationality preaching" in the form of fan-fic, not the other way around. Maybe this changed recently; I haven't read the last 20 or so chapters.
aaronem 12y ago
Ye gods. It's everything I could've possibly imagined from a Harry Potter fanfic written by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
- davidtanner 12y ago
  And then some.
ajaimk 12y ago
I've been reading this on and off over the past few years. The skill level of some fan fiction writers is indeed amazing.
elevenfist 12y ago
I really enjoyed reading this, although after satirizing how contrived the original harry potter is, in the later chapters the story itself becomes somewhat contrived. [spoilers, sort of] I dropped it after the author effective "fridged" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Refrigerators http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Refrigerators, or http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFri...) one of the main characters for the sole purpose of galvanizing another character's development.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  Seriously? Characters aren't allowed to die just because they are female?
chromaton 12y ago
I had skipped the first few chapters (as had been suggested by others) and then started reading. I really liked the bits where Harry tried to figure out the nature of magic by using the scientific method (do wizards call upon magical power directly? or are their magic words and gestures simply controls for a sort of machine which unleashes the real power? Does magical ability follow Mendelian genetics? What kinds of materials can we make using magic?) Later on, it got bogged down in an intra-school magic battle and Hermione and her crew attempting to be recognized as heroes, and that's where I stopped. It just seemed like the author gave up the whole "Methods of Rationality" thing and decided to write straight fanfic: stories and situations in which he'd like to see the characters. I gave up on it.
logfromblammo 12y ago
The "what if" concept is an interesting one, but you can really only keep that up for a few chapters, to show how all the obvious consequences will pan out. After that, the author has to create additional divergences to justify an original story line, particularly with respect to Quirrell. There is a bit too much emphasis on deconstructing the very powerful, yet somehow mysteriously unimportant, plot devices from the source material, particularly the time turners. Yes, a device that allows you to travel backwards in time that is somehow available to barely competent wizarding students probably would not have been used once as a plot device and discarded forevermore. But there is such a thing as the MST3K rule: it's just a book; I should really just relax. We purposefully ignore more details like the fact that spacecraft drive systems powerful enough to not be boring must necessarily be powerful enough to completely demolish whatever interesting plot we had in mind, simply because it gets in the way of the story. If you look at Star Wars, you know in your rational mind--from the first moment a hyperdrive engages--that Death Stars are not the best way to destroy planets, but you throw popcorn at that part of your brain and scream at it to shut up and watch the movie. HPMoR doesn't throw that popcorn. It enthusiastically joins in, and spoils the suspension of disbelief for everyone. But there is that one little bit of the very first original HP book that justifies the premise. It didn't even make it into the film version. Prof. Snape protects the MacGuffin with a logic puzzle, rather than magic, because the vast majority of wizards are completely unfamiliar with common sense. But you can't have a hyperrational wizard among cloudcuckoolander wizards, in the same way that you can't have an interstellar hyperdrive that doesn't destroy planets. Because then you end up with an undestroyable horcrux and a first-year wizarding student who performs tasks nearly without assistance that a full caper crew of adults might find insurmountable. Your suspension of disbelief just has to attach to the chassis at a different point.
- Steuard 12y ago
  From where I'm sitting, this is an inappropriate level of spoilers to include in a comment here. Could you perhaps edit (or cut) your next to last sentence?
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
shinigami 12y ago
Warning: the (real world) point of the fanfic is to recruit people into a cult whose goal is to prevent evil artificial intelligence from taking over the world. Seriously.
- kbenson 12y ago
  You make that sound like a bad thing?
  - shinigami 12y ago
    Paved with good intentions and so on...
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Well I hope that at least Google and Facebook guys pay attention, lest they unleash a recursively self-improving hell on us all ;).
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > to prevent evil artificial intelligence from taking over the world Many smart people find good reasons to care about that. But even if it's a personal goal for the author, it doesn't mean it's what he wants other people to do. http://lesswrong.com/lw/66/rationality_common_interest_of_many_causes/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/66/rationality_common_interest_of_ma... > into a cult Oh well, you realize you're writing this on another cult's news page? ;). http://lesswrong.com/lw/4d/youre_calling_who_a_cult_leader/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/4d/youre_calling_who_a_cult_leader/
  - shinigami 12y ago
    > I've never heard of Paul Graham saying or doing a single thing that smacks of cultishness I love how he implicitly acknowledges that he does a lot of things that smacks of cultishness :) But yes, believe it or not, I was the first person who posted "Paul Graham Ate Breakfast" as a comment in reddit, and someboy created a fake news webpage and submitted it.
swombat 12y ago
Dear Eliezer Yudkowsky, I beg you, please continue writing this awesome stuff. Thanks, Almost Everyone Who's Read This
- crpatino 12y ago
  Also, I hate to bring this on, but is it possible to set a dead man switch to distribute your unedited notes on the final arc... just in case you get hit by a bus over the next couple of months/years?
TeMPOraL 12y ago
What people complaining about "insufferable tone", "author inserts", etc. seem to miss is that HPMOR is not a completely stand-alone story. Eliezer is trying to get across some ideas about rationality, game theory and bayesian statistics he previously described at lenght in his non-fiction writings[0], and he often indirectly refers to them. Having read those posts before discovering HPMOR I very much enjoyed the first chapters and didn't find any "insufferable tone", but I can understand how some of the text can be confusing to people who haven't read Eliezer's blog posts before. [0] - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences
- saraid216 12y ago
  I didn't read the Sequences (mostly, it must be said, because they were boring), enjoyed the first few chapters, didn't mind the insufferable tone, and just ignore the unsubtle preaching. I'm more bothered by That Major Story Event in the 90s chapters than his authorial quality, really.
  - loup-vaillant 12y ago
    What worries me most about that last arc is the possibility that we have to solve the plot before it turns into a sad ending. Eliezer has mentioned the possibility before, and even has done something similar before. We may want to read HPMOR again before the last arc goes out, in the hope of gleaning that crucial piece of information that may save the plot.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  The "Turner Diaries" author was trying to get across some ideas as well.
tzs 12y ago
Another interesting take along these lines (although intended as just a story rather than as educational material) is "A Study In Magic" [1]. It's a Harry Potter/BBC's Sherlock crossover. The Dursley's were killed (in a Moriarty plot), and Holmes and Watson end up adopting Harry. He has learned a lot from Holmes and Watson, and brings this knowledge to Hogwarts. Holmes takes quite an interest in the criminal aspects of the wizarding world. [1] https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7578572/1/A-Study-in-Magic https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7578572/1/A-Study-in-Magic
- mrfusion 12y ago
  Dumb question: is there a way to load that onto the kindle?
  - tzs 12y ago
    Not that I know of, other than grabbing each chapter with something like curl or wget (change the /1/ in the URL to /n/ to get chapter n), processing it to extract the text, and concatenating them, and then sending that to your Kindle over USB or by mailing it to your Amazon "send to my Kindle" address. If you change the www in the URL to m, you get the mobile version, which has less complicated HTML, which might make extracting the text easier. You could also try reading it online in the Kindle browser. I have not tried reading anything from fanfiction.net there, so I don't know how well that works.
  - scintill76 12y ago
    IIRC, I've used FanFictionDownloader successfully: http://www.fanfictiondownloader.net/download.php http://www.fanfictiondownloader.net/download.php
jonmrodriguez 12y ago
I love the story, and am currently waiting for the next installment. One very tiny nitpick is about the title; the story is (at least currently) intended for web-based distribution, and in Chrome (Mac), Chrome (Windows), and Firefox (Mac), the title when rendered in the tab bar is truncated to "Harry Potter and the Meth", which frankly I'm embarrassed to have on my screen. A simple change such as using "&" instead of "and" would fix this.
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
I read a few dozen chapters of this while I was laid up sick a few years ago and after the first few it was with increasing revulsion and curiosity of just how terrible it would get. (The answer is: pretty terrible).
ender89 12y ago
I tried reading this, and I found that I wasn't a fan for two very specific reasons: First, Harry is imbued with a level of knowledge you'd be hard pressed to find at the world's top universities, and that always takes me out of a story. Its not his intelligence that bothers me, but the fact that he's a veritable walking scientific encyclopedia. Secondly, by adding rationality to Harry, the author also seems to have added a healthy dose of irrational fears. There's a moment that is the polar opposite of the original stories where harry decides that "voldemort" is a terrifying name and should be replaced with with "He-who-must-not-be-named". Which is silly and a clear misunderstanding of what drives harry potter and a clear misunderstanding of what "rationality" means.

163 points by lobo_tuerto 12y ago

For those put off by the first few chapters, I highly recommend you try to stick with it, or skip the first 10 chapters. This story starts out with a rather insufferable tone, but after that, it becomes a lot of fun. It's what the author calls "rational fiction", meaning that there are mysteries in it that you can solve, given enough thought (unlike most of the mystery genre).

not_a_test_user 12y ago
I disagree. It starts with a rather insufferable tone and then, somehow, it manages to get worse.
- RodericDay 12y ago
  Agreed. It's great insight into what LessWrong types consider "brilliance", though, so I don't regret reading it.
  - macrael 12y ago
    I've been calling them hyper-rationalists. There's a line somewhere in the story where I think Harry is delighted to have found at Hogwarts a group of people who talk like people in novels instead of all the other people he knows from school. It's a line that resonated with me for sure but gets at some of what I don't like about this philosophy.
  - loup-vaillant 12y ago
    I on the other hand, get no insight from yours not liking hpmor. what exactly did you two found wanting, and why? This is not a challenge. I really want to know.
- asuffield 12y ago
  If you do not value rationality and believe in the primary of the truth, you will hate it. This is not an apolitical story, it is in many ways a manifesto.
  - aaronem 12y ago
    I value a tolerable prose style. Sadly, that is not something which Mr. Yudkowsky can in honesty count among his merits, be they what they may.
  - nemo 12y ago
    I am very sure you could value rationality and still hate the writing. Terms like 'valuing rationality' or believing in the primacy of truth (I think that's what you meant) don't have universally accepted definitions. A rational person might readily find the novel to an Eliezer Yudkowsky's propaganda-novel along the lines of an Ayn Rand novel, and not find it a well written or enjoyable story. The number of parallels between Rand and Yudkowsky are really fascinating to me, Rand and Yudkowsky really seem to be birds of a feather.
    - kbenson 12y ago
      Nobody has said that if you do value truth and rationality you will like it, so I'm not really sure who you are arguing here.
      - nemo 12y ago
        OP stated that a person person who did not value reason would hate the writing. I just stated the converse, that person who valued reason might easily hate the writing too.
        kbenson 12y ago
        The converse of the original statement is that if you hate the writing, you don't value rationality and truth. You didn't state the converse, you seem to have taken it as a starting point and disproved it. But nobody was arguing the converse was true, which was my point.
- crpatino 12y ago
  On insufferability: My take is that during the first 12-15 chapters or so, LessWrong was using the context of the Potter-verse as a pretext to write about his vision on what constitutes "rationality", which may be called "Bayesianism", but I am not really sure. And YES, this part is insufferable. I found that dialogs between Harry and McGonagall were specially awful since those pushed me out of suspension of disbelief almost on a sentence by sentence basis. The history however gets better, at least in the sense that the author stops preaching through the main characters and begins to actually write a story. There are multiple ways this story may offend a portion of its readers, so it is not for every one, but strictly speaking the flow gets better after the first few chapters. Without giving spoilers away, some of the things that tend to annoy people the most are: * Whether the main character (Harry) is a mary sue or not. * The promotion or demotion of certain support characters in comparison with the canon. * The value system of the author, which keeps leaking through the whole story and may touch one sensible fiber or another from time to time. Personally, these issues do not bother me a lot. However I am aware of the shortcomings and would set the story a PG-18+ rating. While it is one of my guilty pleasures, I would not stand any of my children dwell in this kind of "rationality porn" before they have had some exposure to the real world and have pondered over some of the ethical issues that are fiercely debated in our society.
- amalcon 12y ago
  Agreed. It started out rather insufferable, but had a good enough concept (somebody trying to figure out how magic actually works) an a good enough execution on that concept, that it was a very enjoyable read anyway. Recently, he's largely abandoned the "figure out how magic actually works" part in favor of the not terribly interesting plot and characters.
chmullig 12y ago
I got through chapter 10 or 12 and my hate and rage for every character didn't abate. The writing was terrible. I found it to be insufferable mental masturbation for militant atheists.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
Personally, I was introduced to the story via a link to the chapter involving experiments with a time turner to factor products of large primes, or solve any other NP-style problem whose solution is easy to check but hard to find: http://hpmor.com/chapter/17 http://hpmor.com/chapter/17 You can safely read up through the result of that experiment without any major spoilers for reading the story from the beginning. If that humor amuses you, you'll likely enjoy the rest of the story. Also, if you find characters in the first chapters insufferable, it might be worth revisiting them after getting more used to the characters via the later chapters. The "insufferability" is actually addressed in-story and in-character, with some specific reasons given for why people might react that way.
irremediable 12y ago
On your recommendation, I might try it again, perhaps skipping the first 10 chapters.
zephjc 12y ago
I actually found the earlier chapters interesting, but the whole Battle Magic arc rather tedious

MPSimmons 12y ago

Is it done yet? I refuse to read it again until it is. It has, so far, sucked in a week of my time twice, because I had to re-read all of it to remember how the new chapters came about. It's really great writing (as sirsar says, after a while) - at least, I enjoyed it. But it does keep going well after you think it would.

nbouscal 12y ago
Not yet. He's working on the last set of updates, and is hoping to be done by the end of the year.

JoshTriplett 12y ago

There's also a well-done podcast version at http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/ http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/ . (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053802)

StavrosK 12y ago

I love this, it is one of the best things I've read, and I think it made me a better person by changing the way I think. Here's an ebook version I made: https://leanpub.com/hpmor https://leanpub.com/hpmor It should be mostly-current (I'll update it again now).

zyxley 12y ago

MoR? Bleh. It's basically a half-inch away from a self-insert story, with every Doylist weakness in the narrative brutally exploited in a Watsonian manner and every other character made into a drooling moron so that Harry can be a genius by comparison. I much prefer stories like Applied Cultural Anthropology, which takes the informed attributes of characters and runs with them to better flesh out the background and to give every character, including the villains, more Doylist competence. Edit: link is https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9238861/1/Applied-Cultural-Anthropology-or https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9238861/1/Applied-Cultural-Anth... (thanks, Groxx)

Groxx 12y ago
I'll have to check that one out, thanks! Link for others (and for verification, but I think it's right): https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9238861/1/Applied-Cultural-Anthropology-or https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9238861/1/Applied-Cultural-Anth...
Albuca 12y ago
Do you have a link you could share?
zephjc 12y ago
I don't think that's a fair analysis of the characters as the story progresses (except maybe for Ron, but who likes Ron anyway?) How far into HPMOR did you get?
- nikbackm 12y ago
  I haven't read much of this, but I recall a scene where Dumbledore was portrayed in a very unflattering light at least. (Something about trying to avoid dying I think)
  - crpatino 12y ago
    Yeah, I did not like that one either. Though claiming that Dumbledore is portrayed as a "drooling moron" there (or anywhere else for the matter) is not precisely correct.

Indyan 12y ago

I'm a fan of this fanfic. I gave up due to the glacial pace of updates. But, this fanfic has been discussed on HN several times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2429034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2429034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385932

mcguire 12y ago

"'I don't see why it wouldn't be,' Harry said. 'A buckytube is just a graphite sheet wrapped into a circular tube, basically, and graphite is the same stuff used in pencils -'" Well, technically....

sp332 12y ago
They're naturally occurring in soot http://www.azonano.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1782 http://www.azonano.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1782 and I suppose pencil lead as well.
- mcguire 12y ago
  Graphite is used in pencils by being mixed with clay and compressed, then heated in a kiln. It's essentially a ceramic. Diamonds, pure graphite, buckminsterfullerenes, etc., are pure carbon.

anatoly 12y ago

Worm by Wildbow is also very much worth a try: http://parahumans.wordpress.com/ http://parahumans.wordpress.com/ Not a fan fiction, like HPMoR, but rather a lengthy novel about superheroes and supervillains that takes the subject seriously and with an incredible amount of inventiveness. It may sound lame, but just try it for a chapter or two.

DanAndersen 12y ago
Seconding this one. I still haven't finished yet (on chapter 21/30 so far) but I've been quite impressed with it. I will say that it's important to get past the first couple sections, as the "high school" setting initially didn't grab me, but once it got into the world of capes it captured my attention. It's just nice to have characters that actually think things through and don't fall for the typical tropes of the genre.
- anatoly 12y ago
  I was undecided about it right up until the big fight with the big L in one of the early chapters. That was so emotionally captivating, so epic and detail-rich at the same time, I was just walking around in disbelief afterwards going "What the hell did I just read?! How... but how...?!"
  - hollerith 12y ago
    >the big fight with the big L If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to know what chapter (the beginning of) that is in.
    - CocaKoala 12y ago
      I don't know what they mean by "The Big L", but the first MAJOR fight against an unstoppable opponent begins in Chapter 8. edit: Oh, as soon as I posted I realized what they meant by L. WHOOPS.
    - anatoly 12y ago
      It's chapter 8 (or "arc" 8 as the author calls it).

imranq 12y ago

Reminds me of Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby...another story-driven "technical" book. I imagine if all my technical books were written like that, I'd quickly have to check in to a mental institution.

Houshalter 12y ago

People seem to either love this book or vocally hate it with passion. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground, or at least those people never speak up.

maxerickson 12y ago
I don't find it appealing and haven't read much of it (I was aware of it prior to this post). Does that count?
erichocean 12y ago
I suspect it's because the world itself breaks along those lines. It's a bit like how Republicans and Democrats look to a non-statist a hell of a lot like how Protestants and Catholics look to an atheist: they agree on far, far more fundamental things than their actual disagreements, which are mostly at the edges, not at the core. Similarly, whenever Randian-style "reason" is promoted as it is in Methods (to a degree), the world breaks strongly on people who really, REALLY like that sort of thing, and people who truly, absolutely hate it with a passion. (Funny anecdote: a friend of ours in college—a mild, sweet, good-tempered female—tried to read Any Rand's "Anthem" in the school library one day and physically threw the book against the wall she was so upset by it!)
- saraid216 12y ago
  Actually, I like the Harry Potter takedowns he does, but I find the zomgrationality bits boring and just skip the preaching. As fanfiction, it is surprisingly good prose. But you know, it's still fanfiction, namely Harry Potter fanfiction, and thus has trouble actually rising above that. I like Darths and Droids for the same reason.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    I think that the divide might stem from the fact that initially, HPMOR was mostly "zomgrationality preaching" in the form of fan-fic, not the other way around. Maybe this changed recently; I haven't read the last 20 or so chapters.

aaronem 12y ago

Ye gods. It's everything I could've possibly imagined from a Harry Potter fanfic written by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

davidtanner 12y ago
And then some.

ajaimk 12y ago

I've been reading this on and off over the past few years. The skill level of some fan fiction writers is indeed amazing.

elevenfist 12y ago

I really enjoyed reading this, although after satirizing how contrived the original harry potter is, in the later chapters the story itself becomes somewhat contrived. [spoilers, sort of] I dropped it after the author effective "fridged" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Refrigerators http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Refrigerators, or http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFri...) one of the main characters for the sole purpose of galvanizing another character's development.

Houshalter 12y ago
Seriously? Characters aren't allowed to die just because they are female?

chromaton 12y ago

I had skipped the first few chapters (as had been suggested by others) and then started reading. I really liked the bits where Harry tried to figure out the nature of magic by using the scientific method (do wizards call upon magical power directly? or are their magic words and gestures simply controls for a sort of machine which unleashes the real power? Does magical ability follow Mendelian genetics? What kinds of materials can we make using magic?) Later on, it got bogged down in an intra-school magic battle and Hermione and her crew attempting to be recognized as heroes, and that's where I stopped. It just seemed like the author gave up the whole "Methods of Rationality" thing and decided to write straight fanfic: stories and situations in which he'd like to see the characters. I gave up on it.

logfromblammo 12y ago

The "what if" concept is an interesting one, but you can really only keep that up for a few chapters, to show how all the obvious consequences will pan out. After that, the author has to create additional divergences to justify an original story line, particularly with respect to Quirrell. There is a bit too much emphasis on deconstructing the very powerful, yet somehow mysteriously unimportant, plot devices from the source material, particularly the time turners. Yes, a device that allows you to travel backwards in time that is somehow available to barely competent wizarding students probably would not have been used once as a plot device and discarded forevermore. But there is such a thing as the MST3K rule: it's just a book; I should really just relax. We purposefully ignore more details like the fact that spacecraft drive systems powerful enough to not be boring must necessarily be powerful enough to completely demolish whatever interesting plot we had in mind, simply because it gets in the way of the story. If you look at Star Wars, you know in your rational mind--from the first moment a hyperdrive engages--that Death Stars are not the best way to destroy planets, but you throw popcorn at that part of your brain and scream at it to shut up and watch the movie. HPMoR doesn't throw that popcorn. It enthusiastically joins in, and spoils the suspension of disbelief for everyone. But there is that one little bit of the very first original HP book that justifies the premise. It didn't even make it into the film version. Prof. Snape protects the MacGuffin with a logic puzzle, rather than magic, because the vast majority of wizards are completely unfamiliar with common sense. But you can't have a hyperrational wizard among cloudcuckoolander wizards, in the same way that you can't have an interstellar hyperdrive that doesn't destroy planets. Because then you end up with an undestroyable horcrux and a first-year wizarding student who performs tasks nearly without assistance that a full caper crew of adults might find insurmountable. Your suspension of disbelief just has to attach to the chassis at a different point.

Steuard 12y ago
From where I'm sitting, this is an inappropriate level of spoilers to include in a comment here. Could you perhaps edit (or cut) your next to last sentence?
- logfromblammo 12y ago

shinigami 12y ago

Warning: the (real world) point of the fanfic is to recruit people into a cult whose goal is to prevent evil artificial intelligence from taking over the world. Seriously.

kbenson 12y ago
You make that sound like a bad thing?
- shinigami 12y ago
  Paved with good intentions and so on...
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Well I hope that at least Google and Facebook guys pay attention, lest they unleash a recursively self-improving hell on us all ;).
TeMPOraL 12y ago
> to prevent evil artificial intelligence from taking over the world Many smart people find good reasons to care about that. But even if it's a personal goal for the author, it doesn't mean it's what he wants other people to do. http://lesswrong.com/lw/66/rationality_common_interest_of_many_causes/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/66/rationality_common_interest_of_ma... > into a cult Oh well, you realize you're writing this on another cult's news page? ;). http://lesswrong.com/lw/4d/youre_calling_who_a_cult_leader/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/4d/youre_calling_who_a_cult_leader/
- shinigami 12y ago
  > I've never heard of Paul Graham saying or doing a single thing that smacks of cultishness I love how he implicitly acknowledges that he does a lot of things that smacks of cultishness :) But yes, believe it or not, I was the first person who posted "Paul Graham Ate Breakfast" as a comment in reddit, and someboy created a fake news webpage and submitted it.

swombat 12y ago

Dear Eliezer Yudkowsky, I beg you, please continue writing this awesome stuff. Thanks, Almost Everyone Who's Read This

crpatino 12y ago
Also, I hate to bring this on, but is it possible to set a dead man switch to distribute your unedited notes on the final arc... just in case you get hit by a bus over the next couple of months/years?

TeMPOraL 12y ago

What people complaining about "insufferable tone", "author inserts", etc. seem to miss is that HPMOR is not a completely stand-alone story. Eliezer is trying to get across some ideas about rationality, game theory and bayesian statistics he previously described at lenght in his non-fiction writings[0], and he often indirectly refers to them. Having read those posts before discovering HPMOR I very much enjoyed the first chapters and didn't find any "insufferable tone", but I can understand how some of the text can be confusing to people who haven't read Eliezer's blog posts before. [0] - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

saraid216 12y ago
I didn't read the Sequences (mostly, it must be said, because they were boring), enjoyed the first few chapters, didn't mind the insufferable tone, and just ignore the unsubtle preaching. I'm more bothered by That Major Story Event in the 90s chapters than his authorial quality, really.
- loup-vaillant 12y ago
  What worries me most about that last arc is the possibility that we have to solve the plot before it turns into a sad ending. Eliezer has mentioned the possibility before, and even has done something similar before. We may want to read HPMOR again before the last arc goes out, in the hope of gleaning that crucial piece of information that may save the plot.
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
The "Turner Diaries" author was trying to get across some ideas as well.

tzs 12y ago

Another interesting take along these lines (although intended as just a story rather than as educational material) is "A Study In Magic" [1]. It's a Harry Potter/BBC's Sherlock crossover. The Dursley's were killed (in a Moriarty plot), and Holmes and Watson end up adopting Harry. He has learned a lot from Holmes and Watson, and brings this knowledge to Hogwarts. Holmes takes quite an interest in the criminal aspects of the wizarding world. [1] https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7578572/1/A-Study-in-Magic https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7578572/1/A-Study-in-Magic

mrfusion 12y ago
Dumb question: is there a way to load that onto the kindle?
- tzs 12y ago
  Not that I know of, other than grabbing each chapter with something like curl or wget (change the /1/ in the URL to /n/ to get chapter n), processing it to extract the text, and concatenating them, and then sending that to your Kindle over USB or by mailing it to your Amazon "send to my Kindle" address. If you change the www in the URL to m, you get the mobile version, which has less complicated HTML, which might make extracting the text easier. You could also try reading it online in the Kindle browser. I have not tried reading anything from fanfiction.net there, so I don't know how well that works.
- scintill76 12y ago
  IIRC, I've used FanFictionDownloader successfully: http://www.fanfictiondownloader.net/download.php http://www.fanfictiondownloader.net/download.php

jonmrodriguez 12y ago

I love the story, and am currently waiting for the next installment. One very tiny nitpick is about the title; the story is (at least currently) intended for web-based distribution, and in Chrome (Mac), Chrome (Windows), and Firefox (Mac), the title when rendered in the tab bar is truncated to "Harry Potter and the Meth", which frankly I'm embarrassed to have on my screen. A simple change such as using "&" instead of "and" would fix this.

GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago

I read a few dozen chapters of this while I was laid up sick a few years ago and after the first few it was with increasing revulsion and curiosity of just how terrible it would get. (The answer is: pretty terrible).

ender89 12y ago

I tried reading this, and I found that I wasn't a fan for two very specific reasons: First, Harry is imbued with a level of knowledge you'd be hard pressed to find at the world's top universities, and that always takes me out of a story. Its not his intelligence that bothers me, but the fact that he's a veritable walking scientific encyclopedia. Secondly, by adding rationality to Harry, the author also seems to have added a healthy dose of irrational fears. There's a moment that is the polar opposite of the original stories where harry decides that "voldemort" is a terrifying name and should be replaced with with "He-who-must-not-be-named". Which is silly and a clear misunderstanding of what drives harry potter and a clear misunderstanding of what "rationality" means.