#harry potter and methods of rationality

[stiwayzub]

You just do not read Harry Potter and the methods of rationality before sleep, you just don't do it. What was i thinking, hoping that I would stop reading and go to bed like a good girl after just two hours; i should've known I'd be consumed, numb for the world but that of Eliezer Yudkowsky making.

Ever heard the stories of souls being trapped in digital machines? That's me and my kindle after 89th chapter. Don't send help, I'm long gone (like Hermione Granger is)

[akudollie]

Stuck in the hpmor rabbit hole

[soupexpertt]

Recently I got recommended a lot of videos criticizing Harry Potter and no videos talking about how great Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is instead. Like, if you want a better version of the story, just read this fanfiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

In his AU:

-Harry gets adopted by Petunia and an Oxford professor and is homeschooled in science

-When he gets into the wizarding world he is irritated by the society’s bigotry and backwardness and wants to change the world by fusing magic and science

-He is accepted into Ravenclaw and so is Hermione

-He befriends Draco instead of Ron and slowly makes him question his beliefs and actually become a better person

-Hermione has a lot of screen time and her own arcs including the one where she fights against misogyny in heroism

-there’s a homestuck reference

-there’s a death note reference

-at some point Harry bullies the sorting hat

-Voldemort (or rather his actual identity) is a well-written character with interesting backstory and goals

- the plot point where Harry is Voldemort’s horcrux plays a big role in this

-at some point Voldemort uses a gun

-there’s a scientific explanation to how spirits and patronus work

-there’s an mlp reference

-one of the hocruxes is in space

-the Philosopher’s stone is canonically created by two lesbians and one of them is baba yaga

[your-average-teenage-mess]

Okay so.... Does anyone else find themselves caring deeply about the hpmor marauders? Because it feels to me like they have a ton of potential. Just in terms of fanfiction

Like, think about it that way: Remus is basically the same as in the original. James was unambiguously confirmed to have been a dick as a teenager who's gotten better over time. Peter now has a FUCKTON more potential, since he was a secret metamorphemagus, canonically queer, and a SPY FOR THE LIGHT SIDE, who then spent a decade in Azkaban, GOT OUT, and rebuilt his life (presumably with Remus's help). Think of all the potential for angst! I even wrote a fic about it! (Will give the link to anyone who wants it) And Sirius was, yes, evil, but also canonically queer, and there's so much amazing stuff you could do with a teen Gryffindor dark wizard who is kinda friends with a group of bullies who want to believe he's better than his family, aka maybe an asshole, but not ACTUALLY EVIL, and can't pick up on the signs until it's too late, and who- okay, just imagine in the hpmor marauders era, hpmor Sirius manipulating hpmor Peter, who was his BOYFRIEND, who wanted to believe the best about him, who was drawn by his charisma and his charm, and the relationship slowly turning truly horrible, too slowly for Peter to be able to notice what's going on and leave, until it all blows up in everyone's face- what was the big disaster that ended it all? It's for you to decide! And that's not even talking about how hpmor Snape was just everything the fandom wanted canon Snape to be- a dark and edgy and clever and lonely asocial guy who wanted to fit in with the cool dark wizard as a teen, but who still had enough of a true moral compass to truly understand the error of his ways and really try to make amends to the world he almost destroyed, WHICH MADE HIM ALL THE MORE VULNERABLE TO MANIPULATION BY DUMBLEDORE WHO WANTED TO USE HIS GUILT TO PULL HIS STRINGS- why is no one talking about this? This is perfect fandom material!

... Okay. I'm calm now. I'm normal about this.

If you have any, by which I mean ANY hpmor marauders fanfic requests, give them to me and I'll see what I can do.

[randomguy0ntumbir]

"Just pretend to be pretending to be a scientist"

You gotta understand that this quote is so ridiculous it makes you think that Harry was deliberately trying to think of bullshit more confusing than the brain can physically handle, but in reality it only scratches the surface. Harry said this to Draco as part of a -fake- double-layered plot to rewire Draco's brain instead of anything actually important. He was doing this in the -background- while focusing on solving magic itself. This sentence was not a result of Harry actually trying, it was a result of Harry's brain tripping on Hogwarts Special Sauce Blue Beans in the small window of sleep when he is not having wet dreams about Professor Quirrel. The level of effort Harry needs to expend to seamlessly manipulate an 11-year-old stereotype is barely comparable to what he actually needs to do many times later in the book, and I love it.

[cogitoergodoleo]

in defense of hpmor:

i totally agree that the rationality propaganda was insane. rationality in general is just not a good philosophy to live by; it makes you pretty delusional. life doesn't work the way practitioners think it does. they seriously need to chill out.

(also, personally, the transhumanism stuff threw me off.)

and yes, yudowsky was very wordy, but imo i thought it was fine. a lot of writers are a lot more verbose and make a lot less sense. at least he explained himself.

you can't deny that the fic was funny as shit. HJPEV was a whole clown and i enjoyed him very much.

i think ur free to enjoy hpmor if you find it entertaining. but yeah, that fic is an acquired taste.

[angsttronaut]

do you think cults still write fanfiction as a recruitment tool, or was that just the harry potter fandom

[liskantope]

My brief, vague, scattered review of Almost Nowhere

Welp, I finished it, all 1079 pages of it. (Really 1077 pages with the first and last essentially acting as a front and back cover.) As the book is of an unwieldy length and I don't have much time or brainpower at the moment, this post is going to comment on just some aspects of it. Also, as I never managed to gain anything close to mastery of exactly how the plot worked, most of this is going to be vague and avoid discussions of the plot events, character decisions or traits, or anything that specific really. I think a couple of people wrote spoilery reviews; I don't feel very capable of this (nor of giving a very good description of the novel to someone else at a level of concreteness that they would reasonable expect.)

So, I would say no concrete spoilers to follow, and only a couple of quite vague ones.

I noted this in other posts written while I was in the midst of the novel, but I have to say it again because it's one of the most pertinent parts of my experience reading this: Almost Nowhere is the most cerebral fiction-writing I've ever read (with the possible exception of the few chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that I've read), on just about every level including narrative style, plot mechanics, and the ideas and themes explored -- there are even occasional fictional-scientific lectures inserted from time to time (which I found quite enjoyable actually)! More generally, the writing just screams of sheer IQ points both on the part of the author and on the part of the expected audience, in the use of a dazzling vocabulary as much as the elaborate plot and fictional-scientific situations one has to keep track of the characters being in. (It's interesting to note, though, that the cast of characters is actually quite modest, perhaps the fewest I've ever seen for a novel of this size: the complexity of the plot doesn't arise from a complexity of relationships among characters but from a distorted timeline and an array of alternate-reality situations.)

For this reason, I can't help but continue to compare this work to what I've read of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who similarly exudes sheer IQ and writes with an unabashedly cerebral style. Rob (the author, Tumblr-user Nostalgebraist) may not care much for the comparison, since as far as I know he doesn't align himself with Yudkowsky's rationalist movement or consider himself particularly in sympathy with Yudkowsky's worldview. But, while I have very little experience with Yudkowsky's fiction-writing (the main thing I've read of his is the Sequences), my impression is that their fiction is extremely different, that Yudkowsky's fiction comes across as just a transparent "mouthpiece" for his rationalist views and ideas, and that Yudkowsky has far less talent for fictional narrative. HPMoR (or what I've read of it) gives me an interesting plot and characters and makes me think about rationalist-y ideas in a direct, easy-to-follow way. Truly emotional non-cerebralness is actually pretty frequent in HPMoR but conveyed in a way I recall finding rather awkward. Almost Nowhere, on the other hand, took me on a vast, sweeping journey, where an even greater proportion of the scenes carry a colder, more dispassionately intellectual ambience, where moments of raw emotional intimacy are rather few and far between but are far better written when they do occur.

I think this is ultimately why I stuck with Almost Nowhere despite struggling to follow many aspects of the plot (while I lost too much motivation only a dozen or so chapters into HPMoR): I felt like I was being taken somewhere and was able to enjoy where it was taking me. The whole novel felt like a slightly surreal dream and an escape to a far vaster space than the one I inhabit in real life. Perhaps the feeling of being in a dream enabled my brain not to particularly care about precisely following the intricacies of the plot, as tends to be one's brain state in dreams. Of course, I shouldn't leave this as an implied "excuse" for not doing a good job of following: among the main reasons were intellectual fatigue from the general nature and business of the rest of my life, being a bit too rushed to get through the novel so that I can move to the rest of my reading list, general mental laziness, and, well, a dash of general mental ineptitude I suppose.

Specifically, what I struggled throughout to follow was some of the timeline shenanigans and that paths carved out within them by various individual characters, as well as recalling characters' experiences and motives at different times, and just generally keeping track of the scifi mechanics. I also had a tendency to glaze over some of dense dialogs that were more... I hate to keep using the word cerebral but don't know how else to characterize them... or that were more technical or jargon-filled or sounding like computer coding. Regarding the scifi mechanics, I did enjoy the occasional lengthy "lessons" delivered by characters and mostly followed their teachings but had a tendency to forget many of the finer (but still important) points later on -- for instance, Sylvie's big fictionally-written-lesson chapter at the end was really fun reading and I followed the interesting ideas going on but (even though it was near the end) did have trouble remembering everything in it pretty shortly afterwards.

The fictional-scientific mechanics themselves made for a very interesting elaborate thought experiment, and for the most part they made a lot of sense, as in, some hypothetical universe could work under these mechanics. I'm not sure that keeping vague links between different paths among alternate realities in the form of dreams or nostalgium doesn't seem like a bit of a cheat, but I'd have to think over it more deeply before deciding that, and I liked how it played in the story. I was a bit taken aback near the beginning about the role of Maryam Mirzakhani's fictional-scientific discoveries since as far as I knew Mirzakhani never worked on such things, but I much later realized that the earlier parts of the novel were written when she was still alive and young and potentially able to make discoveries of that nature in the then-future (for those who don't know, she tragically died in the late 2010's at age 40, partway through the writing of Almost Nowhere and shortly after becoming the first woman to get the Fields Medal).

As I've mentioned, the cast of distinguishable characters is very modest for such a huge novel. The characterization of each is on the subtle side, and to some extent I don't think I ever truly got to understand the deepest layers of Grant and Cordelia because I didn't put in the right amount of effort. I expect the only two which are memorable enough to stick with me for years when I look back on reading this are Azad and Sylvie. Azad was a pleasure to read and I had to enjoy the scenes where he was present or narrating -- interestingly he has one major Bad Moment around the middle of the novel in which he behaves in a certain way that earns him a ton of criticism at the time, and then after all the fuss is made it all seems to sort of get forgotten about. I don't know what I'm really supposed to think of him ultimately, but I'll miss his beautifully intellectual soul. Sylvie's scenes, in contrast, are a bit grating to read, but I suspect they're supposed to be. In a way, I know even less how I should feel about him than about Azad: his deepest biases and motives frequently seemed to exist in an occasionally-clashing tension. The bleak cacophony surrounding him is punctuated with sharp humor that I appreciate: he's a bit of dark vortex but he's also such a good boy.

The idea that we eventually get to see the characters get together and write the book that we are now reading doesn't seem original to this work of fiction, but I can't think precisely where I've seen it anywhere else, and it was fun. Rob's ability, as shown (to a milder extent) in The Northern Caves to be able to speak and write in very distinct character voices is impressive and maximally showcased here.

The novel, as Rob pointed out in one of his posts about it, comes with three distinct parts, the second of which distinguishes itself by having chapters numbered in Arabic numerals with chapter titles and is built of scenes with an entirely different flow. This second part was easily my favorite to read and felt more like surreal and placidly dreamlike escapism than any other area of the book. I don't know if anyone else has made comparisons between the fictional-novel-within-the-fiction-novel The Northern Caves (Rob's novel called The Northern Caves is the only other of his that I've read -- and liked a lot -- and its plot revolves around a bizarrely opaque thousand-plus-page novel of the same title), but I couldn't help being reminded of my conception of the fictional novel TNC throughout Almost Nowhere (also a thousand-plus-paged rather difficult novel, with surreal aspects to the narrative and layer upon layer of meaning, even if it doesn't devolve into apparent nonsense partway through). And I made this connection the most during Part 2 of Almost Nowhere, recalling that the fictional novel TNC is explained to have a sort of middle "lucid section" made of vignettes which mostly consist of coherent dialog but in which the characters have different relationships than they did at the outset (i.e. in TNC the two main characters who were siblings now appear to be married). I felt sort of drawn toward experiencing the journey that TNC would take me along, particularly the middle lucid section part just consisting of little dialog scenes, and I felt like in a way I got some version of that through Part 2 of Almost Nowhere.

(This is the most spoilery I'll get:) The final chapter of the novel ends on the point of view of the character who I had forgotten (but soon realized) was the one the very first chapter began on. It felt only fitting to go back to the first part of the first chapter and skim it, to close the loop (so to speak). I was almost never actually emotionally moved by Almost Nowhere exactly, but with the ending-looped-back-to-the-beginning it came close.

I remember when the novel was first finished this past summer, Nostalgebraist made a post discussing the finished product a bit, and I ran into one or two effortposts by other people discussing how they felt about the plot and characters. I didn't want to spoil them at the time, and I didn't want to look for them just after finishing before I wrote my own thing (this post), but I'd like to find them now and would appreciate anyone pointing me to them (I can probably find the Nostalgebraist posts easily enough).

Anyway, it's impressive work Rob, congrats on finishing such a hefty project, and thanks for giving me a unique fiction-reading experience I'll never forget!

[spider-artdump]

[techiekittie]

HPMOR has fucked up my dopamine levels diabolically I have just realised all the books I’ve read are at best a level 2 and this book is on level 8 and the only thing that brings me joy is reading this book again

but like also I understand barely any of the rationalist stuff since I’m an idiot so that’s bad

[stiwayzub]

Trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to make science sound dirty (this moment was preceded by a morality lesson on how nobody is genetically programmed to know why killing people is bad btw. Just uh. Thought i should say that)

[thestormlightnetwork]

stop who was gonna tell me hpmor was gonna mentally shatter me for a chapter then present these silly 🪿🪿

OMG SILLY GEESE

back on track: who was gonna tell me that hpmor will shatter me for a chapter then give me these silly omake files?? ACHOO HOUSE???

[witchofanguish]

I can’t fucking take it anymore

[boshetunmaj]

my newfound passion, once upon a time many, many years ago i read harry potter and the philosopher's stone just to read methods now

[idontcarecarebear]

I know this has probably been done before but now it’s my turn!

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

What are your and @therealvinelle's opinions on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (hpmor.com)?

Alas, @therealvinelle and I both have policies against doing meta/critique of other people's fanfiction. We tend to be overly critical people and fanfiction writers, who write things for free, don't deserve to be slandered by some clown on tumblr.

So as to make it fair, this means we don't do it for fics we really do like either.