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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1449 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 30, 2025

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So, what are you reading?

Still on The Dawn of Everything. Picking up Tom Brown's School Days.

Reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It's actually quite a fun fan fic. I wish Yudkowsky had stuck to writing fiction, he's quite talented in that realm!

I am very surprised by a continued stream of praise (including such words as "genius") piled on HPMOR. I read it, and it was fun, and I admit the premise is pretty clever. But both as a fantasy book and as a literature it seemed to be very mid. Tons of plot lines lead to nowhere. Main reveal is obvious very early. The main protagonist is very Mary Sue. Other characters are severely under-developed. And coming back to the premise, what actually comes out of it? I mean yes, the protagonist wins (I don't think it's much of a spoiler that the titular character in a fantasy book wins at the end, and especially if he's named Harry Potter, right?) but isn't that where the interesting part starts? I mean, by that point HP is basically a god. And he intends to make everybody else into gods (without even asking them, of course - I mean why would he, they are all NPCs anyway). Or only wizards (what happens to muggles btw?) Isn't it something we may want to address somehow? Nah, we're done here, buh-bye.

I mean it's fun, I do not deny it. But genius? Life-changing? "one-shotted a substantial percent of the world’s smartest STEM undergrads"? I mean I knew undergrads now are not what they used to be, but really?

HPMOR has many flaws, but it really does achieve what it sets out to do. It...

  1. Provides a fantasy wherein merely being actually intelligent (as opposed to being iron man or sherlock holmes intelligent) is enough to gain social status, wealth, and power.
  2. Actually manages to teach general principles by which its audience (high schoolers) can become more intelligent.
  3. Captures the essential fantasy of harry potter in general.
  4. Doesn't make any of the invisible-to-normies but backbreaking-to-autists mistakes found in most ordinary literature.

Provides a fantasy wherein merely being actually intelligent (as opposed to being iron man or sherlock holmes intelligent) is enough to gain social status, wealth, and power.

Yes, but not exactly. HPMOR's premise is that being intelligent makes you super-powerful. And it's not like Tolkien characters are not intelligent (please, no "why didn't they just order Eagle Uber to Mordor", it had been done to death) - it's just, as in the real world, intelligence is not enough. Otherwise we'd all be ruled by God Emperor Yud The First, The Only And The Eternal by now. But in HPMOR, intelligence makes you a god among mortals, pretty much literally. Unfortunately, this means all other characters (except maybe one or two) must be dumbasses for that to work out. That's disappointing.

Actually manages to teach general principles by which its audience (high schoolers) can become more intelligent.

Might be, not being a high-schooler I can't make much use of that, so here might be a part of it that I am unable to appreciate.

Captures the essential fantasy of harry potter in general.

I must disagree here. The essence of how Potter wins has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with feelings, especially love. The whole premise of the original HP universe is that Voldie is smarter, more powerful, more capable, more ruthless, more everything, than any other character in the universe (including Dumbledore, which is close to his level but ultimately is also done in by him). And he still loses, because he doesn't know what it means to be human, and that's, evidently, how the magic works in that universe. HPMOR universe runs on pure intelligence, the concepts above aren't even featured there. Many people - especially rationalist, autist, introverted, hyper-intelligent geeks - may feel much more at home at the latter universe than at the former, but those are very, very different universes, and claiming HPMOR captures the "essence" of the original work is very far from the truth. If anything, it captures the external trappings while hollowing out the essence and substituting another - maybe more palatable to the geeks, but completely different.

Doesn't make any of the invisible-to-normies but backbreaking-to-autists mistakes found in most ordinary literature.

I've noticed a number of literary mistakes (like, dangling plots, unmotivated actions, etc.) when reading it but of course I already forgot the specifics. But I am willing to believe HPMOR does not have a kind of mistakes that trigger the autists so much, like claiming in one part that certain staircase in Hogwarts had 12 steps, and in another chapter saying it's 11 steps. Of course, no normie reader had ever cared or will ever care about this. Avoiding such mistakes indeed may make it an easier read to certain category of readers - but that doesn't make it a work of literary genius. At least my threshold for it is much higher - and in a different place too.

I am only a few chapters in, to be fair! The beginning is very fun and engaging. Can't speak to the book as a whole.

He doesn't have any other fiction on the level of HPMoR, though, does he? "Three Worlds Collide" was interesting but not great. I really like "Kindness to Kin" but it's just one short story. I'm working my way through "planecrash" right now, and so far it's a pretty good first draft of something that could have become a good novel series after it got a ton of editing that it didn't get.

On the other hand, HPMoR is roughly four long novels put together, and I watched it get produced in real time and saw how little editing it got, and although I find that intensely annoying (I'm trying to avoid getting too spoilery, but at at least one point there's an explicit moral that the protagonist has been an idiot by neglecting to consider advice from others, and the irony just hurts), it's quite amazing for someone to make it from beginning to end of that much writing, juggling a coherent arc-plot through multiple major tonal shifts, without ever seriously dropping the ball. In "planecrash" he's at least capable of co-writing and adapting to others' ideas, so he could have handled working with an editor if he'd ever actually made a career of writing and gotten one.

You may enjoy some of his other glowfics; I really liked "but hurting people is wrong". There's also the conspiracy world, a series of stories set in an alternate Earth. And the Masculine Mongoose trilogy on Tumblr. But, yeah, he mostly does one-shots.

Oh, hell, I forgot about the Masculine Mongoose! Yeah, those were wonderful, and more accessibly so than "Kindness to Kin"; still short stories, but I shouldn't have forgotten to mention them.

The "conspiracy world" stories were interesting but not great as stories.

I hadn't read "but hurting people is wrong"; thanks for the recommendation!

He doesn't have any other fiction on the level of HPMoR, though, does he?

Not on the level of MoR, but he is very likely the author of The Waves Arisen, which is a similar take on Naruto, with less intensive plotting.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, at his best, has leaps of genius nobody else can match. Fifteen years ago, he decided that the best way to something something AI safety was to write a Harry Potter fanfiction. Many people at the time (including me) gingerly suggested that maybe this was not optimal time management for someone who was approximately the only person working full-time on humanity’s most pressing problem. He totally demolished us and proved us wronger than anyone has ever been wrong before. Hundreds of thousands of people read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, it got lavish positive reviews in Syfy, Vice, and The Atlantic, and it basically one-shotted a substantial percent of the world’s smartest STEM undergrads. Fifteen years later, I still meet bright young MIT students who tell me they’re working on AI safety, and when I ask them why in public they say something about their advisor, and then later in private they admit it was the fanfic. Valuing the time of the average AI genius at the rate set by Sam Altman (let alone Mark Zuckerberg), HPMOR probably bought Eliezer a few billion dollars in free labor. Just a totally inconceivable level of victory.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone

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