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.
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.