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Comment by braingenious | Hacker News Reader

I was not aware that there is an Atlas Shrugged-length Harry Potter fanfiction about rationality.

Learn something new every day!

YMMV. I tried to finish it based on a strong trusted recommendation, but could not get past the insufferable author-inserts, and the unpleasant and unbelievable hero character.

What's the name of it?

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I'm glad such a thing exists, but I could never work up the interest to read it myself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_o...

wait, really? I scrolled right past someone posting about "Harry Potter rationality fanfiction" and thought, "huh, oddly specific burn but it's chuckle worthy".

it's an actual thing?

This is a joke, right? tongue in cheek or something. Or should I go get some Brawndo to water my basil...

It's not only a thing, it's almost 2000 pages long.

I too didn't finish it - assuming it's "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality".

I got caught up by the multiple times the main character made sweeping assessments of things with insufficient information, and just happened to be right by accident (or author fiat I guess). The main characters figure things out by Thinking Really Hard, and experimentation is only ever done to prove they were right all along to other characters.

That's an arrogant character who keeps falling into the right answer, not a scientist.

It went above your head.

It went above their head because it was poor writing in their view? Why would you think taste in writing has anything to do with their ability to understand the points the writer was trying to make? This seems unecessary and you are probably capable of coming up with a more interesting response.

It was supposed to be a flawed protagonist.

It's commonly thought (and obvious) that Yud wrote the book about himself so I doubt it. It doesn't really fit the rationalist playbook either, they take themselves excessively seriously.

The character's author-insert aspects are self-parody.

He's too fragile and prone to overcompensation for that, nice try. Of course he's going to back track after getting mercilessly mocked for it and then claim it was just a joke.

The first few chapters have a song scene parodying ghostbusters and a joke about the protagonist biting a teacher in a tantrum as a young kid. There's plenty of elements of crackfic parody in it.

> a joke about the protagonist biting a teacher in a tantrum as a young kid.

wasn't that literally Yudkowsky, tho

Not disagreeing that Harry in the story is an author self-insert, just with that it's a fully self-serious non-parody one.

At the end Harry is basically a Messiah that can order the magical world to provide emergency medical aid to everyone in the whole world and turns Hermione into basically an angel; not really seeing the story itself saying he did anything wrong...

You're describing one of the unofficial fan-written fanfic sequels.

I saw it as an attempt at popular outreach, a puff piece for a rather niche philosophical view.

If it "goes above the head" of the people it's targeted at, that just makes it a poorly written puff piece.

Nah, HPMOR just sucks, plain and simple. There was no need for a HP fanfiction in the first place. Also, if you ever ask anyone that reads fanfiction, no one will ever have a positive opinion of HPMOR. There are millions of HP fanfics, and there are many that are much better than HPMOR. My guess is that it was set in the HP universe just so it could be popular.

My strong belief is that HPMOR is a Harry Potter fanfic not for any calculated reason, but just because the author was in a demographic maximally interested in making Harry Potter fanfic.

he has literally stated that's why he did it as a Harry Potter fanfic. "There's a large number of potential readers who would enter at least moderately familiar with the Harry Potter universe." He was also reading a lot of HP fic himself, so he knew the stuff.

Let me slightly revise my claim:

I think that Eliezer is very well-situated by both age and social niche to find HP fanfiction vastly more appealing than most human beings do. I think that he genuinely finds the idea of "Harry Potter but more as a hard fantasy with a hero bent on breaking the setting by using everything without regard for genre convention" interesting as a story concept. And when he set out to write up his ideas about rationality in the form of something other than dry nonfiction essays, I think that HP fanfiction sounded good to him.

I don't think that he correctly found the medium that is maximally appealing to the potential target audience for his ideas (like, I definitely do not want to read a super long Harry Potter fanfic, and I think I'm joined in that by essentially everyone who's not a very geeky millennial), and I don't think that he gritted his teeth and wrote a HP fanfic in order to increase the audience for his ideas despite not liking HP fanfics.

> I definitely do not want to read a super long Harry Potter fanfic

This hits the nail on the head for me.

I mostly enjoyed the books as a kid, but didn’t really maintain being a Harry Potter “fan” into adulthood. Out of the dozen or so “hardcore” millennial nerds that I know really well, there’s exactly one person that I think would attempt to read something like that, and based on the reviews I’ve read, I would bet that she would struggle to finish it, if at all.

There is a somewhat interestingly vocal group of internet adults that insist that the default mode for nerds in their 30s is to be Harry Potter super fans, some of whom lapse. Like we were all raised Catholic and some stray.

I was a big fan of Animorphs at that age too, but you won’t see me going around reading or writing Hork-Bajir/Andalite fanfic. Because I enjoyed it as a kid and then went on to read other books.

> That's an arrogant character who keeps falling into the right answer, not a scientist.

When is Harry Potter and the Reproducibility Crisis coming out?

Really, you found it surprising that a book written by the insufferable author of the insufferable blog LessWrong is insufferable?

It's not really about rationality past the first four chapters or so, after that I don't really know what its about but when part of the plot is helping Voldemort break people out of azkeban then rationality is clearly not an important theme.

It’s a very, very entertaining read, although it loses its way and loses steam a bit as it goes on

I think the first chapter is really fun, then it loses steam and by something like chapter six it has fukky jettisoned the promise chapter one sets up and it is strictly in "ok to terrible" territory for the rest of it.

It's not just Atlas Shrugged-length, but Atlas Shrugged-quality!

I disagree, Atlas Shrugged was much better, used an original premise and had an interesting phrase throughout ("Who is John Galt?").

HPMOR is really garbage-tier. It's parasitic on another series, doesn't have much in the way of a good story, and quite legitimately makes shit up. There are much better HP fanfics (and indeed books) written by people that are not as "smart" as Yudkowsky and also didn't have an agenda to push.

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