Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality just got several fascinating updates

by benhamner • 13 years ago

125 99 13 years ago

Just gotta say, I don't appreciate the "women in refrigerators" trope.

I read an earlier version of this and felt it had a few very dark moments that, even allowing for it being based off a young adult book, seemed out of place. I've never read the original and so I wondered if this was playing off something in the source material e.g. villains that couldn't really be villainous in an adult way.

JulianMorrison4• 13 years ago

The original is full of Dastardly-and-Muttley villains who are evil because it says "evil" on their character sheet; what motivations they have are shallow and their plots are made by Acme.

loup-vaillant9• 13 years ago

It's more than that. (spoiler alert)

Generally, only NPCs get to be stuffed into the fridge, so we don't actually feel sorry. This one is different.

JulianMorrison4• 13 years ago

Nope, the classic fridging is: build up a female character and put her on a bit of a pedestal for feminine virtues (check, modulo the character's age, but it's unchanged canon so I can't blame EY), make her a love interest for the male lead (check and not canon), and then callously fridge her so as to motivate the male lead and give the antagonist a moral event horizon moment (check).

swombat4• 13 years ago

If you've not read this yet, don't start... unless you have a weekend to spend on it.

HP & the MoR is one of the most compulsive and intelligent reading experiences out there. Comparable to the late Iain M Banks in compulsion, imho, and half again as clever and witty.

GFischer2• 13 years ago

Actually, you've made a good pitch for Iain M. Banks, haven't read him yet, but if it's half as good... :)

randallsquared• 13 years ago

The inverse of half again is two thirds. Just sayin'. :)

clavalle• 13 years ago

You are in for a treat.

n09n6• 13 years ago

So, why should an adult choose to read this over actual literature?

gyardley• 13 years ago

It's inventive and clever, extremely well-written, and the combination of a hyper-rational character in a fantasy world setting is unique. Don't let 'but is it literature?' questions deprive you of an enjoyable reading experience.

That said, you probably will get more out of it if you've already read J.K. Rowling's novels, and if you worry about whether something's 'actual literature' or not, I'm guessing you haven't.

bgilroy26• 13 years ago

I'm not in it, but it seems like it has a neat, active community.

unimpressive5• 13 years ago

There are two kinds of fan fiction, fanfiction that degenerates from the source material, and fanfiction that generates from it. The former is much more common than the latter but this is without question the latter kind.

Then again, I can understand if you have better things to do, I try not to read books that I'd regret spending the time on later. As a litmus test, if I could revoke having read HPMoR in exchange for the time I used, I wouldn't.

bromagosa8• 13 years ago

I agree with you in all possible ways.

Counting that your average lifespan will be around 85 years, and you've been reading real literature since you were 14, that gives you 71 years of good reading. That is, if you are lucky enough to preserve your eyesight.

On average, let's say you read about 12 books per year, which gives you the sad total amount of 852 books you'll be able to read in your whole life. In my case, I've still got enough time for 684 more books. Think about this when you go into a library. A whole life worth of books fits into a couple of bookshelves...

There are more authors worth reading than books I'll ever be able to read before I die. So, nope. IMO you should NOT choose to read this over actual literature.

swombat4• 13 years ago

This is "actual literature". I say this as someone who greatly enjoys world classics as well as modern writers, everything from Gogol, Tolstoi, Kafka, Dickens, Dumas, and so on...

The only point of reading JK Rowling, imho, is to make HPMOR more fun.

unimpressive5• 13 years ago

There are more authors worth reading than books I'll ever be able to read before I die.

Since you seem like you would have an interesting opinion on this: What books do you feel I should read before I die?

gjm112• 13 years ago

Someone so concerned to optimize their reading experience really ought to be reading more than 12 books a year.

Luc4• 13 years ago

Which work of literature is it, I wonder, from which you got this idea that min-maxing your life is the way to happiness and fulfilment?

msg• 13 years ago

A couple weeks ago, I read 3 books by Lois McMaster Bujold over the span of a week. She writes Hugo winning sf, poignant and thoughtful.

One book a month would be a living nightmare. If that's all I had time for, I would turn my life upside down.

This book really rips after it gets going. It is not for everyone. There are occasional blobs of 'rationality', but nothing like Ayn Rand's interminable philosophical passages. It's a great meta take on Harry Potter. And it succeeds in its own right as an adventure story. Maybe not emotionally, you could argue about that.

gizmo• 13 years ago

At the risk of taking a pithy dismissal a little seriously:

Different categories of books offer wildly different experiences, and the marginal utility of great literature goes down the more literature you read. By reading the best books in different genres you get a far more richer and rewarding experience than by reading only great classical literature (or only the best biographies, or only the best scientific literature).

hpmor is at a local optimum, or at least close to it. It is clever, contains tons of in-jokes and obscure references to geek culture and the book successfully subverts many tropes. So if you liked reading sci-fi or fantasy as a kid or if you like geek culture you probably will like hpmor as well. Try the first chapter or so and see for yourself.

n09n6• 13 years ago

It is clever, in-jokes and obscure references to geek culture and the book successfully subverts many tropes

Thanks, that's enough to tell me that I wouldn't enjoy it.

Tichy2• 13 years ago

I think you are probably not open minded enough to enjoy it anyway, so in your case I'd recommend to skip it and sticking to something with more complicated words and more obfuscated and mysterious messages that allows you to sustain your airs of high culture and intelligence.

honestcoyote• 13 years ago

Because this is one of the more interesting books of recent years, creating an interesting story, showing the tragedy and comedy of a very logical and rational boy who tries to interact with chaos of humanity, and the book manages to work in many discussions of science, rationality, politics, Bayesian statistics, and the potential and limits of each. If this book had used an original setting with renamed characters but was identical otherwise, it would be hailed as a modern genre classic.

If you have any interest in fantasy / sci-fi / or the original Potter setting, this book also deliberately sends up or subverts many of the tropes common to this setting. The application to the fantasy settings is particularly interesting due to the main character attempting to apply the scientific method in a world where people can perform magic and do so without questioning where it comes from, and the book therefore tries to take Clarke's old maxim to its limit.

Is it literature? I personally think so. Will it be read in fifty years? I have no idea and care little. Do adults need to only sit down with incredibly serious books which have been approved by a set of gatekeepers? No. You're missing out on a world of weird and wonderful things if you limit yourself in such a way.

n09n6• 13 years ago

If this book had used an original setting with renamed characters but was identical otherwise, it would be hailed as a modern genre classic.

If that were true, then wouldn't it have happened already? 50 Shades of Gray is a famous example of fanfiction that was well-received enough that it got rewritten into a standalone work. I wasn't impressed. I see no reason not to interpret "best fanfiction" as "least stinky poop".

cabalamat• 13 years ago

In what sense is fanfic not actual literature?

n09n6• 13 years ago

In the sense that it is almost uniformly trash.

ebbv• 13 years ago

Something tells me the people who like this are the same ones who think Big Bang Theory is hilarious.

Luc4• 13 years ago

Nope.

Tichy2• 13 years ago

From what I have seen I really despise Big Bang Theory, but I loved HPMOR.

jmagoon• 13 years ago

Because it might cause them to take themselves less seriously.

smsm423• 13 years ago

The same reason an adult could watch football instead of (insert your favorite meaningful activity here). Some people happen to like it.

n09n6• 13 years ago

Football isn't known for typically being aimed solely at teenaged girls. Harry Potter fanfiction is.

tehwalrus• 13 years ago

I've not seen this before - the first three chapters have had me guffawing something dreadful!

I'm going to have to ration my reading of this...

bryanlarsen2• 13 years ago

Is it done yet? I read it when it was half the length it is now, and thoroughly enjoyed it. When it is done I will read it again, starting from the beginning.

Luc4• 13 years ago

I don't know if Eliezer has said anything about how long he intends it to be. A new story arc just started, and it's pretty great. It seems like this could go on for a few more years.

Ilverin• 13 years ago

He said that he is done through chapter 96, and implied that it might be the end (said at chapter 86 that there were "2 or 3" arcs left, and arcs tend to be about 4 chapters...).

manku_timma• 13 years ago

Lost two nights to this one. It is definitely the best fan fiction I have read and more so. IMO JK Rowling's version pales in comparision to this, but without the inconsistencies of the original book, this HPMOR wouldn't have been possible. If you've read the original, you owe it to yourself to read this.

Osmium2• 13 years ago

Out of interest, how many people recommending this usually read fanfiction? Because I gave it a try a good while back but got a bit frustrated with it. It seemed to read more as a parody (albeit a good one) rather than something more faithful to the characters.

limmeau• 13 years ago

I've never much read other fanfiction, and I don't mind the parody at all. Actually, it has kind of spoiled the plain HP for me because I just can't take their fixed gold-silver exchange rate seriously any more.

n09n6• 13 years ago

If any setting makes sense to keep a fixed exchange rate between gold and silver, wouldn't it be one where magic exists, including the actual philosopher's stone?

paulgerhardt• 13 years ago

I have never read any other fanfiction but I found this series a good primer on modern logic and fun idle reading.

Unfortunately, it has a few cringeworthy moments and tropes[1]. It is definitely precocious at parts and not hard to draw the parallels with the whole Übermensch/Singularity thing (though to my understanding, the author has distanced himself from the organization and is currently at MIRI).

My chief criticism would be that it is overly bashful of the original Harry Potter story logic but lacks a tight plot through the second half. (Admittedly something very difficult to do with serialized fiction.) Up until chapter 87 I got the feel the story went off the rails, but the last few updates have been very interesting (no spoilers.)

If you enjoyed Snow Crash and do not mind fantasy, you would probably be into this. Don't take it too seriously and keep in mind it is about 1000 pages now.

[1] In particular: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySue / http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MartyStu

TillE• 13 years ago

Yeah, I tend to flip past the extended preachy bits, which are really poorly done. The story itself holds up without all that, though, and it's quite engaging.

loup-vaillant9• 13 years ago

to my understanding, the author has distanced himself from the organization and is currently at MIRI

MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute) is the new name of the SIAI (Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence). They shed the term "singularity" because it has basically been hijjacked by Ray Kurzweil and his Singularity University (totally not the same organzation). MIRI also gave (or sold) the Singularity Summit to the Singularity University.

I don't recall Eliezer distancing himself from any organization. It's the organization he works for that distanced itself from certain memes.

(Recall that "Singularity" historically meant one of 3 things: Event Horizon, Intelligence Explosion, or Accelerating change. Now, with Kurzweil popularity, it only means the third thing.)

MaxScheiber2• 13 years ago

Interestingly enough, Yudkowsky probably uses these tropes deliberately. He himself is a reader of tvtropes.org[1], he's made explicit reference to using tropes before[2], and it makes senes that someone like Yudkowsky would know exactly which tropes he was and wasn't including.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/EliezerYudkows... [2] http://hpmor.com/chapter/7

DennisP• 13 years ago

I don't usually, and maybe that's why I wasn't concerned with faithfulness to character. I read the first Harry Potter, and this several years ago, when it was much shorter. I liked this one a lot better.

I hope, with all the additions, he hasn't gone too far in the direction of education over story.

loup-vaillant9• 13 years ago

I have read the whole thing. The story is still great, and the education doesn't bother me (it integrates well in my opinion).

I may be biased by my having read the LessWrong Sequences however.

rictic2• 13 years ago

It's not a single point of departure fic, many of the characters are deliberately significantly different.

nullspace• 13 years ago

The index page looks really interesting, the kind of index page that would lead me to read the book. Can someone give a gist of what this fanfic is about?

(I loved the Harry Potter series and I love Nassim Talebs works if that matters)

edent• 13 years ago

Imagine if Harry Potter was a little more inquisitive...

In this universe, HP was raised by scientists. So, whenever he is introduced to some new magic, he says "Why? How? What are the limits?"

For example - could one apparate to the moon?

rictic2• 13 years ago

Also many (but not all) characters have had their competence, intelligence, and in general their power level increased significantly (so that the story stays interesting, given that Harry's intelligence has been greatly boosted too).

bliker• 13 years ago

Chapter 2 starts with C style #include statement.

tome• 13 years ago

Do you have to have read (or like) Harry Potter to appreciate this? I read several chapters (8 or so) and I actually found the story very distracting from the rationality message.

skizm2• 13 years ago

I would say yes. So much of the world is taken directly from the actual Harry Potter books and a lot of the fun is to see the effect new Harry has on the same world.

loup-vaillant9• 13 years ago

I would say no. There are readers who haven't read the original book, and still enjoy the fanfic. I agree that much of the fun is taken away from those, though.

chunkit• 13 years ago

I stumbled over this a few years back and decided not to start reading it until Yudkowsky stopped adding to it or at least chunked some subset of the chapters into one or more books. When I read fiction such as this I want there to be a clearly defined beginning and end to the story. Eternal soap-operas, even if clever, aren't for me.

loup-vaillant9• 13 years ago

It will end soon. I'd say in a year from now, at most. There is also an e-pub version.

jychang• 13 years ago

Oh man, how do you stand A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones then?

ZeroGravitas2• 13 years ago

I've just realised that this is somewhat the inverse of the Science of Discworld books.

Those books are split into alternative chapters of popular science, and Discworld stories about the characters reacting to our science from their point of view as characters in a fantasty novel.

So you get wizards that accidentally create a "strange" universe full of "roundworlds" and then having them wondering why people don't fall off the bottom, cue chapter on gravity and planet formation. Or in the second one they meet the "God of evolution".

I avoided reading them for years assuming they were going to be full of Dorling Kindersley "Science of Star Wars" type books full of pop-up AT-ATs and cut-away diagrams of lightsabers, but they're among the best pop science books I've read (though, I'm a fan of Pratchett, which undoubtedly helps)

comex• 13 years ago

Hmm... I wouldn't agree with the people in this thread hailing it as a great work of literature. The main character is a complete Mary Sue - somewhat like Ender, but, in my opinion, considerably worse, although it's been toned down a bit in the later chapters.

But I only say that to counter those people - it's indeed a delightful and addictive read. The only problem is that it updates quite infrequently and is nowhere near done - I had been suspecting that it'd been abandoned. Reading 90 or so chapters (at high speed, due to the addictiveness) only to come to a screeching halt and have to wait months for a few more chapters is not that fun!

loup-vaillant9• 13 years ago

While Harry is ridiculously overpowered, his enemies are correspondingly scary.

Eliezer won't abandon this fic. If I recall correctly, there is one last arc left after the current one one. Though I would't count on it before next year.

wnewman• 13 years ago

Not just his enemies. For me, a number of the most memorable flourishes of the book are how formidable it makes some of the other people, at least in some respects --- the defense professor especially, but at various points in the story he turns the formidability firehose on people like Hermione and Aurors and the prankster brothers. It's a bit of a dramatic problem, actually, because it leaves people who haven't been sprayed looking so ineffectual that it's hard to understand why they take up so much dramatic space. E.g., I think the story would work better if Draco got more formidability to justify his apparent importance. At least Draco could have gotten a chance to win big by applying some of the applied organization theory tips from his father, perhaps by being the one to deploy effective staff/delegation/incentive techniques in the war games. Or the unimpressive frontline support security provided by his father could be backed by a second-line security specialist chosen by his father who shows up on call and gets some of the formidability and formidabilitytrainer love that the story gives to Aurors and defense professors.

swombat4• 13 years ago

I wouldn't call it a "great work of literature" - but I would call it a work of literature, and, as you put it, a delightful and addictive one.

Nyubis• 13 years ago

On Harry being a Mary Sue: That kind of depends what meaning you use.

If you mean the self-insertion, I think that's not too bad. Yes, Harry's reasoning is similar to Yudkowski's, but that's kind of the whole point of the fic. It's not like Harry is a copy of EY himself.

If you mean being idealized and overpowered, I agree. The only part so far where things went wrong because he didn't think fast enough or consider all the possibilities is in the most recent chapters.

On it not updating often enough: Totally, but up to chapter 96 will be released over the next few days, so you may want to stick around for a little longer.

saraid2162• 13 years ago

If you mean the self-insertion, I think that's not too bad. Yes, Harry's reasoning is similar to Yudkowski's, but that's kind of the whole point of the fic. It's not like Harry is a copy of EY himself.

FYI, Eliezer has explicitly stated that Harry is sometimes wrong and that he disagrees with him. He hasn't given specifics AFAIK.

skizm2• 13 years ago

If you are just starting this, make it through at least chapter 10 before deciding if you want to stop reading. That's where things really pick up.

benhamner• 13 years ago

If you've not read this, strap yourself in - you're in for a ride. Eliezer, an AI researcher, has created this novel from a simple yet fascinating standpoint - what if Harry was a brilliant rationalist who engaged the magical world from a scientific standpoint? Don't dismiss this because it's a fanfic or incomplete - it introduces rationality, breaks many fantasy and geek tropes, and builds off Rowling's universe in a highly entertaining and thought-provoking page turner (I guess a modernization of this idiom would be "iPad flicker").

tzs• 13 years ago

If you like HPMOR as entertainment (rather than just for educational value), then another fanfic you might enjoy is "A Study in Magic" [1].

It's a crossover between HP and the BBC's "Sherlock", where the Dursleys get killed before the start of the story in one of Moriarty's schemes against Holmes. Holmes and Watson end up adopting Harry and raising him. Harry learns a lot about observation and deduction from Holmes, and makes good use of this dealing with the problems he confronts at Hogwarts. Holmes is not content to act like a normal Muggle parent and ignore the wizarding world once his child leaves for Hogwarts. He takes an active (and not always welcomed) interest in wizard affairs.

[1] http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7578572/1/A-Study-in-Magic

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality just got several fascinating updates

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