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Comment by HDThoreaun | Hacker News Reader

As far as manifestos go HPMOR is a pretty good one. I think that’s what a lot of the critiques about it miss. Yudkowsky is actually a pretty decent writer, especially in the fan fic scene. Not only is his prose actually acceptable which is pretty rare in fanfic it’s clear that he actually thought through a lot of the plot points ahead of time. Harry Potter universe fits very well for his story not only because it’s popular with the target audience, but because there’s a ton of unexplored authority figures in the original and the main goal of the manifesto largely boils down to rejecting blind belief in authority and blazing your own trail. I think it’s hard to separate the number of people who read it because it’s legitimately the best Harry Potter fanfic from the people who read it for the manifesto stuff which again points to the ingenuity of choosing it as a setting.

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For me this is probably the weirdest part of it. I have read HPMOR and was distinctly underwhelmed by its literary quality. I mean, it's not bad, but it's not serious literature. It's not even on the level of the original HP. It's a fanfic. Sure, it's a fanfic with a lot of fan service and geekery and so on, so the audience is targeted masterfully. But still, it's hard not to notice the numerous literary faults. I mean, "he actually thought through a lot of the plot points ahead of time" is a kind of praise, but not one that a decent literary work expects. That's like saying about a chess grandmaster that he actually knows how all the pieces move. I mean, sure, on the fanfic scene it's probably above median, but I've seen people making out of it some kind of epic revelation, akin to some kind of a sacred text. Completely undeservedly, in my opinion, and rather weird for a community that is so proud in it's objective and rational approach to things that put it into its very name.

> and rather weird for a community that is so proud in it's objective and rational approach to things that put it into its very name.

The people who form fan clubs and cliques are in it for ego stroking/wealth/power with "rational" being tossed in the boot.

Is it strange that I

1) Have no interest in Harry Potter (wasn't able to get through the first book, and maybe saw two of the movies)

2) Have disdain for most of what I see from both rationalists and EAs

3) Thoroughly enjoyed HPMOR

I thought it was kind of like The Martian, but long

It's terrible as a work of literature. It has many, many, many flaws, but the most serious is that it's boooooring. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages go by with nothing happening except creepy children preaching at each other.

It's terrible as a fan fiction. Not a single character acts anything like the original, the world is unrecognizable, and the plot is derailed entirely by the end of the second or third chapter. The original story needs to be distorted beyond recognition because the author's bizarre worldview works even more poorly in a fantasy world than it does in reality.

It's demonstrably effective as a manifesto, but that is despite the fact that it is riddled with scientific and conceptual errors.

It's one of the worst things I've ever read. The fact that people like it is evidence of the bizarre incestuous nature of the community that produced it.

War and Peace is shorter than HPMOR.

Anyone who knows anything about Harry Potter fandom in those years knows that its readers were always thirsty for something new in the Potterverse to read or be exposed to. By latching onto that universe's incredible popularity, Yudkowsky exposed a large number of young, inquisitive people to the ideas of rationalism. It was essentially a recruitment mechanism, one that was wildly successful. Many rationalists freely admit that their first exposure to rationalism was via HPMOR.

I don't think Harry Potter fans would look kindly on their favorite story being treated with such contempt. Remember that within about three sentences of introducing Ron Weasley our hero finds him guilty of the heinous crime of enjoying sports and concludes he should not exist.

Excuse me. It was Draco Malfoy, our rapist deuteragonist, who said that. Our hero merely agreed.

Maybe Harry Potter fans would read a bad fantasy book, but HPMOR is not just a bad fantasy book. It is repugnant to healthy people from the first few pages.

I really, really dont understand this complaint at all. Harry and draco disliking ron is supposed to show that they are snotty kids who have big blind spots. The characters are supposed to be dislikable at the start, the story is about the growth they experience from there. This is part of what makes it a better story than the original. Yudkowsky's harry grows as a character which basically doesnt happen at all in the original series.

Do you dislike succession too? Some people just need completely heroic protagonists in their stories. Thats fine, but it doesnt make the story bad.

They are introduced as insane, not snotty. Nearly the first thing Draco says is that he plans to rape Hermione and our Hero uses his Agency to do exactly nothing about it. (It is hard to exaggerate how bizarre this story is to people who haven't read it.)

Hundreds of pages later, Harry uses the first iota of power he is given to prohibit students from playing Quidditch according to rules he believes are irrational. There is an immediate outcry which he dismisses because it's just the mewling of inferior intellects. It's hard for me to see any signs of growth here.

(Harry's contempt for sports is amusing, given that about a third of the story is dedicated to his love of cheating at a particularly moronic sport invented by the Lord Voldemort ripping off Ender's Game.)

He convinces Draco that his whole ideology is wrong. He convinces him not to rape anyone before he rapes anyone. Not exactly sure what the better outcome is here, just turning him in would only strengthen his violent ideology. There are many complaints to be made about the story, as you said its boring and too long and often too preachy. A lot of the visible changes in the characters happens in the last quarter. Even though the whole story has been building to that it can seem like its a bit out of nowhere.

Does Yudkowsky spill more ink on condemning Draco's hatred and violence or on making fun of Hermione Granger's feminism? Voldemort is treated as an ultimately worthy adversary, while Ron is a joke and Hermione is a pet handed power by our Awakened Hero. Yudkowsky treats sexual violence, genocide, and mass murder as forgivable missteps on the road to greatness, but treats liking sports as a fatal character flaw and being concerned with human rights as risible. Arrogance is consistently rewarded while goodness is consistently ridiculed.

I don't claim Yudkowsky believes these things consciously, but they are omnipresent in his story and they reflect his bizarre attitudes to morality. The fact that he acknowledges at the very end that the characters he created are fools doesn't change the fact that he spent six hundred thousand words holding them up as paragons of virtue and rewards them with apotheosis.

Hermione is the actual hero of the story. Every time rationalist harry makes a mistake he is acting against her direct advice. Her character literally exists to show off his deficiencies and his coming of age basically boils down to realizing he should be more like her.

For many reasons voldemort is an ultimately worthy adversary. Much of that has to do with Harry's biases that come from being too invested in rationalism. Since he considers himself above everyone he's ever met he longs to find someone he considers his better and voldemort fills this role. He wants a mentor so badly that he's willing to throw out his entire ideology to keep him. I think yudkowsky's portrayal of voldemort as the ultimate adversary to rationalism is better than pretty much any plot arc in the original story. Harry does ultimately completely reject voldemort so Im not sure how sexual violence, genocide, and mass murder as treated as forgivable. From the very beginning Harry is deeply concerned with human rights, his distractions and the path he takes toward achieving human rights in this messed up world is again an integral part of the story.

> The fact that he acknowledges at the very end that the characters he created are fools

I think this is my biggest issue with your characterization. Yudkowsky shows harry to be a fool from the very beginning, as you pointed out with the draco/ron stuff. With his dismissal of much of hermiones advice. He very consciously did not create harry as some ubermencsch character who can do no wrong. He shows that harry believes himself to be a parity of virtue, but that he very much is not until hermione's death.

This is a forgivable statement if you didn't read it, because then I guess you may not have seen that there's themes at play and a point being made. If you did read it I do not understand how you don't see how you are meant to dislike the summary judgement and the judgement itself being an effect of yet another plot point.

But then if you did not read it it seems a little disingenuous to say "this is a bad book", because you would not only not know but anything you did know you would not understand.

What is there in the story that indicates this judgment is wrong? Ron does not appear in the story again, while by the end Harry is an immortal superbeing. His arrogance is never once punished.

You can be a sexually predatory sociopath and still be of value in Yudkowsky's world, but like sports and you're dismissed in your entirely within a single paragraph.

> What is there in the story that indicates this judgment is wrong?

The ending? https://hpmor.com/chapter/122

> "Ah..." Harry said. This was very hard to say. "Actually, the rest of the world doesn't know this part, not even the Headmistress. But in point of fact you were one hundred and twelve percent correct about [spoiler], and I'll remember for future reference that although 'Dark' and 'evil' may not technically be the same thing, there's a great big statistical correlation."

> "Oh," said Hermione, and fell silent again.

> "You're not saying that you told me so?" said Harry. His mental model of Hermione was yelling: I TOLD YOU SO! DIDN'T I TELL YOU SO, MR. POTTER? DIDN'T I TELL YOU? [spoiler], I SAID, BUT YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TO ME!

It feels like most people who criticize the story didn't actually read it, and just start with the premise that Yudkowsky sucks at writing, then conclude that obviously Harry Potter must be Mary Sue, and that whatever Harry says is what Yudkowsky wants you to believe.

If you actually read the story, you will find out that many things that Harry said and believed turned out to be wrong. That ending was written by Yudkowsky, too. The characters that disagreed with Harry since the beginning, such as Hermione and Dumbledore, were written by Yudkowsky, too. Perhaps there is a little more depth in the story than if you assume that it must be a Mary Sue story.

Ah, yes, the ending where the invincible Superman uses his gigabrain to singlehandedly save humanity, end death itself, get the girl (and turn her into an immortal magical unicorn princess (yes, really, this story is dumb)), vanquish a dozen Wizard Hitlers at once, and tear apart entire stars for their raw resources shows that he paid the price for his earlier arrogance.

I have read the story in its entirety. Don't ask me why. The fact that our Lord and Savior holds the idiot ball on occasion does not make him realistically flawed. The fact that Voldemort would have realistically been exposed within thirty seconds makes the story dumber, not smarter.

Also, you ignored the question I actually asked: where does Harry realize that it is wrong to steamroll everyone he thinks is stupid?

> I have read the story in its entirety.

Then how could you make so many mistakes in one sentence?

> end death itself

was done by Flammel

> turn her into an immortal magical unicorn princess

was done by you-know-who

> tear apart entire stars for their raw resources

is foretold to happen in unspecified future, outside the story time frame

I loved HP as a kid; I loved HPMoR.

Harry is a sociopath in HPMoR. he's not the hero. he's a blatant Mary Sue for the author, the book is unapologetic Rationalist propaganda, and it features such improbable sentences as: "Harry glumly considered the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1956."

I find it side-splittingly hilarious to imagine an eleven-year old magic wizard boy hero acting like he does.

maybe my sense of humor is warped, but I find it hilarious. it's like the Satanic Verses of Harry Potter.

Agreed. It's quite bad. Like, even for fanfic, it's not good. And a lot of fanfic is written by fourteen year olds.

> It's terrible as a work of literature. It has many, many, many flaws

Pretty much all fan fiction is terrible literature. I find yudkowsky's prose to be above average for fan fic which admittedly is just saying hes among the best of the worst. Every single fanfic ever written that doesnt end after 1 book has significant boring sections, theres no editor.

> Not a single character acts anything like the original

This is the point. Yudkowsky recognized that the hp world acts as a natural foil for his ideology. By changing the characters he points out the original characters flaws, but also the ways they are better than the rationalist versions of the characters. I dont understand why people claim fanfic should be always be faithful to the original setting. Using it as a foil can work too. The characters in the original, especially the authority figures are all incredibly flat. Why would you want more of that? Even the ones he largely keeps the same, like dumbledore, he explores in a new light which makes them seem different even though they are very similar to the original. The reveal that the 2 Dumbledore's are actually very similar(the exact same?) characters is central to understanding rationalist harry's deficiencies.

> The fact that people like it is evidence of the bizarre incestuous nature of the community that produced it.

Agreed but I think this says more about how crap HP fan fic tends to be than anything else. Yudkowsky saw unmet demand and used it to shoehorn his ideology in

>he author's bizarre worldview

what is the author's bizarre worldview, other than the AI will make us extinct view?

Sounds a lot like Atlas Shrugged, then.

I suppose there is worse sci-fi you could launch a cult from (Dianetics)

What are your favourite quotes from it?

Let me be clear, he's no cormac mccarthy(my favorite prose is the passage from blood meridian describing the raiders). My bar for fan fiction prose is basically whether it annoys me, its a low bar. Most of what makes hpmor good is the cleverness with which yudkowsky subverts the original harry potter world to try to make a rationalist argument, whether that be by inverting a character or playing off the harry/voldemort relationship in thoughtful ways.

'"Voldemort," said the old wizard. "I understand him now at last. Because to believe that the world is truly like that, you must believe there is no justice in it, that it is woven of darkness at its core. I asked you why he became a monster, and you could give no reason. And if I could ask him, I suppose, his answer would be: Why not?

They stood there gazing into each other's eyes, the old wizard in his robes, and the young boy with the lightning-bolt scar on his forehead.

"Tell me, Harry," said the old wizard, "will you become a monster?"

"No," said the boy, an iron certainty in his voice.

"Why not?" said the old wizard.'

as you can see its nothing special, just good enough

I see, thanks. It reminds me a little of those spam emails which are sprinkled, intentionally, with obvious spelling errors. They aren't trying to trick the average person, they are trying to filter for a much smaller, more valuable audience.

yes exactly. Fan fiction readers largely do not care about grammar or nice prose, just has to not be overly distracting which unfortunately most fan fic fails at

fwiw, I don't think that was intentional here. He's just more interested in "ideas" than prose or people. A more extreme example of Andy Weir. Definitely a niche. I read it years ago while backpacking and it perhaps needed an editor but the overall struggle/war and reimagining of logical fallacies of the HP universe's magic were fun.

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