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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3718 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 24, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I think for me they're "intelligence and competence porn". Roughly, it's the idea that an intelligent and competent person, put into a dark and evil situation, can use the light of reason to restore order and uncover hidden secrets. Thriller novels, of the techno- and military- varieties, also do that for me. As with porn, I worry that over-consumption by susceptible demographics can induce unrealistic expectations of human behavior. ;-)

It took a couple of read-throughs of HPMOR for me to get that a) Harry was not being held up by EY as a role model, and b) the main moral of the story is that (spoilers all) he left a trail of pointless wreckage as he broke anything that got in the way of him doing what he thought was right, and if not for the vow Quirrelmort had him take, he would have broken everything.

Even contemporaneously with the release of the story, Yudkowsky was complaining at length that people read both Harry and Quirrel as both far more correct and far more competent than they actually were, whether not noticing their failures or overstating their accomplishments. Reality ended up pushing that even further, for Harry -- the first twenty chapters are filled with a lot of pop social science that was iffy to start with and didn't really survive the replication crisis -- but there are other errors that I think were intentional, even fairly early on.

Great post. I think many LWers and HPMOR readers were probably so starved for a single decent teacher in their entire schooling that they latched onto themselves as Harry and yearned for someone with Quirrel's attitude to BS.

if you don't mind adding some more spoiler tags, how did how did he almost break everything?

I read the remarks about quarks and antimatter and black holes and plagues in Chapter 119 as "if not for Quirrelmort's forcing an Unbreakable Vow onto Harry, he'd do something world-breaking, or worse. And then with that as the eventual lesson, re-reads of the work reveal a different meaning to the EY-cool that @fishtwanger talks about.

I assume this refers to the moment where the Vow stopped him from revealing the wizarding world and the Transfiguration Stone to the muggles, the implication being that if he did it, the chances of someone casting Summon Earth-Destroying Amounts of Antimatter Just To Try It would skyrocket.

That's the one.

Other criticisms aside, I think EY was trying to do three things at once, but fell short with two of them due to internal contradictions. He wanted it to be 1) a teaching tool for rationality, and also 2) to have a literary character arc where Harry learns and grows, and also 3) to max out his personal sense of cool (hereafter "EY-cool"). But 2 and 3 hide 1, making it hard to tell what's actually a recommended course of action, because the bad stuff seems precisely as EY-cool as the good stuff. And 1 and 3 hide 2, because Harry is relentlessly portrayed as EY-cool, whether or not he's making mistakes. And so what comes through is a lot of EY-cool, sprinkled with a bunch of rationality lessons where you need to read the entire thing, possibly several times, to figure out what's a recommended approach (not to mention keeping up with the replication crisis), and a character who goes from being portrayed as smarter and more mature than everyone around him, but slightly silly, to being portrayed as smarter and more mature than everyone around him, but slightly sad. (But maybe that's how EY views his own personal development.)

Interesting analysis, and exactly the sort of thing I was asking for elsewhere in the thread. I read the whole thing in more or less one sitting for fun, and so while I wasn't terribly impressed and definately think it suffers from some a lot of the problems I perceive in rationalist fic generally, I'm not at all confident that I really got the intended message.

It’s quite a book, and for me the most underrated aspect is how endgame HPJEV is a metaphor for how quick-takeoff AI constrained by alignment measures might still be able to do significant harm.

I've read HPMOR and that certainly was not the takeaway I left with, but I would be exceedingly interested to hear what I've missed if you have the time to elaborate.

Today I learned Yudkowsky did a Harry Potter Fanfic. The more you know.

Yup. Kicked off (or perhaps codified) a whole genre of rational fanfiction.

It is linked under library on lesswrong, so it is kind of the top of the canon as far as rationalist fiction goes. Other major works are:

  • Scott's Unsong (Original setting)
  • Alexander Wales' "Worth the Candle" (Original setting)
  • Alicorn's "Luminosity" (Twilight 'fan'-fiction, of all things)
  • Eliezer et al's planecrash (collaborative glowfic, Dath Ilianian isekaied to the world of the RPG Pathfinder)

All of these authors also have shorter fiction. If you are unsure, I would start with something shorter and see if you like the style. There are also audiobooks of HPMOR and Unsong.

Note that Alexander Wales also has an ongoing work, Thresholder (currently at 650,000 words, vs. 1.7 million for Worth the Candle).

1.7 million? That just seems ridiculous. Why does this work need to be three times as long as war and peace?

Why does this work need to be three times as long as war and peace?

Because it's being written for narrative addicts. People enjoy the altered flow-like state created by reading a long narrative for hours at a stretch, their own consciousness and volition being overridden by the flow of the story. For such people, the story concluding is a problem because it breaks the state, while additional length is pure benefit, because it allows for more contiguous false-memory and thus more verisimilitude to the experience.

People enjoy the altered flow-like state created by reading a long narrative for hours at a stretch, their own consciousness and volition being overridden by the flow of the story.

Narrative-gooning.

More or less. And to be clear, by "people" I'm referring to myself, and presuming that others read for roughly similar reasons.

I remember this post of yours where you floated psychoanalyzing the mindset of rational fiction after finishing Worth the Candle. I’d be interested in hearing what you had to say about the genre based on what you’re saying here.

It's never left my mind, and is both the reason I posted the OP and the reason I'd be interested in hearing what people liked about HPMOR.

This thread, via Orwell, is me poking at the same general idea. Sherlock Holmes is another example, as is Orson Scott Card from Ender's Game, and I think Tolkien's negative assessment of Frank Herbert's Dune. For examples of the opposite, one of my favorites is Hammer's Slammers, by David Drake, especially the first chapter of the first book.

Web serials are more like reading a series of novels.

I would guess most series clock in below this. Harry Potter for example is only about a million words.

Sure, but it's not competing with most series. Some people are looking for a more sprawling project. See comparisons here.

I don't know a lot of people who would buy an entire series of doorstopper fantasy novels and then read them back-to-back. It's a different story for buying the new Sanderson book when it comes out. Following a serial is even less of an imposition.

That's not to say it makes for good literature. If you're looking to uplift your human spirit or to gain cred with humanities majors, Tolstoy will be much more efficient.

I think most published series have a lot cut by editors to keep pacing tight. Serials obviously don't do that. Worth the Candle and Worm, another famously long web serial that iirc is also about 1.7 million, definitely suffer in my opinion from significant sections that probably could be largely cut and have any plot progress moved into brief sections within other arcs.

Are you not familiar with web serial novels? The Wandering Inn may well hit 17 million words sometime next year.

It's hard for me to fathom who has the mental bandwidth for this.

I read ratfics on lunch daily at work. Not much simpler than that. I read both HPMOR and Worm that way.

I was about to respond, "some people like to read a lot," and then I remembered I was on The Motte. Surely this isn't news to anyone here!

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