6 ms·

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 ins

by 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.
        nemo 12y ago
        You are right, I stated the alternate case of those who value rationality and truth as opposed to those who do not, rather than the converse. Sorry, I was being too loose with my language there. As to what the other was arguing, I was chiming in, not posing a critique, so your point is peripheral. In discussions one is permitted to add thoughts that are related without it being some kind of intellectual sparring. If I were sparring I'd have debated the claim that those who don't value rationality and truth would dislike the book (which is a hard claim to justify), but that would have been a pointless exercise since I don't really care. I did care to point out that rational, truth-seeking people could find that the book was unbearable, since that was my experience and something I thought was worth noting. If you disagree, then please feel free to explain, I'd be interested to learn how rational people must agree that it was a well written piece of fan fiction.
- 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

by sirsar 12y ago

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.
        nemo 12y ago
        You are right, I stated the alternate case of those who value rationality and truth as opposed to those who do not, rather than the converse. Sorry, I was being too loose with my language there. As to what the other was arguing, I was chiming in, not posing a critique, so your point is peripheral. In discussions one is permitted to add thoughts that are related without it being some kind of intellectual sparring. If I were sparring I'd have debated the claim that those who don't value rationality and truth would dislike the book (which is a hard claim to justify), but that would have been a pointless exercise since I don't really care. I did care to point out that rational, truth-seeking people could find that the book was unbearable, since that was my experience and something I thought was worth noting. If you disagree, then please feel free to explain, I'd be interested to learn how rational people must agree that it was a well written piece of fan fiction.
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