Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
hpmor.com
hpmor.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.
If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to know what chapter (the beginning of) that is in.
edit: Oh, as soon as I posted I realized what they meant by L. WHOOPS.
Another good scifi web fic is Ra: http://qntm.org/ra. It's about a world in which 'magic' was discovered in 1972 by an Indian physicist. The story largely revolves around the search for what 'magic' really is.
The lack of foreshadowing probably wouldn't have shocked me. I'd be very excited about how the author deals with the implications, though: while mind-uploading is relatively mundane, its consequences are huge.
If not, would the author object to someone scraping their site to make an epub version?
Q2: Will there be an ebook version?
A2: I hope to self publish and sell some somewhere down the road. Going to finish the story first and edit things as thoroughly as possible first.
Q2a: Can I have an ebook version for free? I’d like to read offline.
A2a: I have some, but I’d rather not distribute them. There’s unethical sorts who are taking others’ work and claiming it as their own (often with a title/name change) and I’d rather not make it easier for them. I know there’s a few fanmade ebook versions circulating, I accept that it’ll happen, but I don’t want to help the process along.
I’m hoping to get a polished version out at some point. Should you be interested, send me an email at Wildbowpig [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line ‘WormPublishNews’. I’ll mass-email everyone on that list when the time comes, to let them know about release. (For all worm news, use the subject line ‘WormNews’.)
There's even a Go scraper github that will give you the most up to date version. I donated to wildblow and will probably nab a copy that way.
If this book is virally blowing up so much like this, then the author should get around to self-publishing on Amazon. I donated so I'm probably not a lost sale, but I can't speak for others whose preferred medium is epub.
Now that it's finished, it seems like it would work better if edited into a print or ebook format. The narrative could be split into two or three books with each designed to have self-contained storylines, making the differences in focus and scale less jarring.
It also has the same basic problem that most superhero fiction does, where a lot of the setting as presented is constructed to allow contrived superhero punch-ups and doesn't make that all that much sense in the context of how the characters and their powers would actually affect the world.
This problem is kind of a given if you want people running around in colorful costumes and capes, though, unless it's a setting where superhumans have only just appeared, like in the excellent novel Turbulence (http://www.amazon.com/Turbulence-Samit-Basu-ebook/dp/B00B0LP...).
Wildbow stated that the timeskip suffered for poor execution and a lot of IRL stuff that was going on at the time (including a semi-forced 2 week break from all internet/computer stuff mid-arc), and he intends to rewrite it and cover different bases for the published final version.
Source: Am Wildbow.
It's a bit late to hope for a response, but I'm somewhere around 7.08 - should I wait for a revision or just read on and revise my opinion later? At any rate thanks for writing and I hope you get the book deal you very richly deserve.
All need a solid editor, but they're awesome and I can't believe the big publishing houses don't have people looking for stuff like this.
At the same time I wonder how they could convey all the details of rational thinking, internal dialogue and the like. I think it has the same issue the film of Ender's Game had in that it's just hard to include those details from an external perspective.
I think you could tell most of the story non-verbally: a good character actor should be able to get across most of the emotions. Put some more of that into conversations and I think you could get there.
(Aside: my issue with Ender's Game was that it felt "small": the whole movie felt like it occurred over a long weekend or something. There was no sense of complexity or time.)
I also find the business model to be very interesting as a sign of the times, some more thoughts on that in the aforementioned review: http://jsnell.iki.fi/blog/archive/2014-05-24-book-review-wor...
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.
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.
This is not a challenge. I really want to know.
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.
I just stated the converse, that person who valued reason might easily hate the writing too.
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.
It intuitively appeals to me that people in cults might not have the self-awareness to debate their own cultishness, but, then, I don't really know anyone in a cult. At one point I did meet a couple at a party who were involved in... something... that involved homeopathy and a spiritual leader. And they chuckled and said that they might be in a cult.
Hmm… I don't. Oops.
That said, having read most of LessWrong, my impression was that what is said there is mostly obvious in retrospect. Like, "Of course, how could I not see that?". My guess is, I already believed most of the sequences before I even read them.
When a community matches my own world view so closely, I just can't feel any cult, and I tend to assume there is none.
I had exactly the same reaction. Most of it seemed obvious in retrospect. Heck, few years ago (when I had a lot more of free time) I spent many weeks thinking about how could I code a smart virtual assistant/proto-AI. Then later, after reading the sequences I realized that I figured out many of described concepts myself, except I lacked the proper formalisms and maybe haven't thought some things thoroughly enough.
I mean, if you value truth, you'd better be rational, or you're not going to find it.
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.
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.
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.
Seriously.
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_ma...
> into a cult
Oh well, you realize you're writing this on another cult's news page? ;).
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.
Well he does and doesn't hide from it, and the "Eliezer Cult" is a running joke on LessWrong. Someone close to him even made a cover for his writings [0] ;).
Most of his writings are basic maths + some good thinking, but there are points where he holds opinions many find eccentric. He also discusses cults at length, you might find [1] interesting ;).
[0] - http://hg.ciphergoth.org/scrape-sequences/raw-file/8504183da...
[1] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/md/cultish_countercultishness/
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
No rational person could describe that groupthink madness as a cult. :)
I used to be involved with a religious group many outsiders consider to be a cult. There was always this event that everyone outside kept bringing up - that one little prediction 40 years ago that some people took too seriously and ended up making stupid life decisions. (I'm not close to that group anymore, but I still value those people as the most honest and consistent in their thinking folks I ever met)
Yes, people who extrapolate things from their beliefs to guide their life decisions can and do make mistakes. They will reach stupid conclusions and believe them until they figure out that those conclusions are stupid and rethink things again. I still respect them more than the usual crowd (both in religious and non-religious groups) who claim to believe (or believe that they believe) one thing and actually believe something else. I value consistency in thinking.
EDIT:
Disclaimer, before I get labelled as a cult priest for replying in the cult thread for the fourth time: I have my pet peeve with cult accusations, because I've been close with many groups accused of cultishness - both religious and secular, and I know how this is an impossible accusation to defend from. If you try to tell "hey, it's not a cult, because X" then it's definitely a cult, because that's obviously what a cult member would say.
Also, you want to see real cults? Try political parties ;).
- Cults usually employ a number of heavy-handed psychological manipulation techniques, often together (e.g. 12-hour conference sessions; speakers that drone on at at about 50 beats per minute; loud, lengthy chanting that exhausts your brain's oxygen and makes you less critical; preying on people who are desperate for some reason)
- It's not enough for a cult to have you as a member - they also have to remove the influence of other movements from your life, lest you might realise who stupid it all is and break off. So part of a cult's mode of control will involve breaking off your relationships with other groups important in your life: family, religion, work... and replacing them with social ties within the cult.
- Cults generally require escalating levels of contribution. At first maybe you just need to donate a bit of money, but by the end your entire life is at the service of the cult.
If the accused cult doesn't fit any of these criteria, it's probably not a cult, just a bunch of very devoted zealots. If it fits even one of these criteria, start to worry. If it fits more than one, it's almost certainly a "bad" cult.
Source: my dad's a psychologist and studied cults, but this is just from memory.
They are more frustratingly ignorant, over-certain of thing that are far from knowable, than a cult. People really want to be certain, they want answers, and they will latch onto all kinds of things to get it, even believing in an 'friendly AI' as an ersatz God, with an inevitable singularity as an ersatz rapture, and quantum mechanics substituting for metaphysics.
"Silly over-extrapolations of local memes, jargon and concepts are posted to LessWrong quite a lot; almost all are just downvoted and ignored. But for this one, Eliezer Yudkowsky, the site's founder and patriarch, reacted to it hugely. The basilisk is completely banned from discussion on LessWrong, where almost any mention of it is deleted.[4]"
[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20140618083128/http://www.reddit....
I'm not going to justify myself (okay, a little bit[1]), but I must say I'm at a point where such assumptions make me raise an eyebrow.
When we solve those insights, we will be more able to accurately estimate when AI is due. It may be no time at all however, if hardware proves to be capable enough already.
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.
A succinct blurb about what to expect plot-wise could be something like "covers many of the events of the actual series, but all in the first year and more rationally". If someone has read the canon HP books, they can probably infer Azkaban, Horcruxes, Polyjuice, portkeys, Quidditch, and so on will make an appearance in some fashion. They might not think about the time turner though, and if you're trying to get someone to read the book, and that someone knows about NP problems, mentioning the author addresses possibly solving NP problems with time travel, that's such a small spoiler but can pique the interest enough that someone may read it who otherwise wouldn't have. (Can you get talk about NP problems in fiction outside of sci-fi? Would you expect it from a Harry Potter fanfic?)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898783
Here's an ebook version I made:
It should be mostly-current (I'll update it again now).
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.
Does that count?
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!)
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.
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-Anth... (thanks, Groxx)
Link for others (and for verification, but I think it's right): https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9238861/1/Applied-Cultural-Anth...
(Something about trying to avoid dying I think)
As for the other characters, their level of agency varies, but at the very least Quirrel, Hermione and Draco are also agents (i.e. smart enough to be capable of driving the story in a meaningful way), and the other characters are portrayed fairly accurately given their stupidity in the original books.
In the original book, ALL the characters are stupid. In HP:MoR, 5 characters are not stupid. I think that's an improvement.
Professor Quirrel?
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.
Well, technically....
I imagine if all my technical books were written like that, I'd quickly have to check in to a mental institution.
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.
I beg you, please continue writing this awesome stuff.
Thanks,
Almost Everyone Who's Read This
[spoilers, sort of]
I dropped it after the author effective "fridged" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Refrigerators, or http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFri...) one of the main characters for the sole purpose of galvanizing another character's development.
(The answer is: pretty terrible).