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Comment by operatingthetan | Hacker News Reader

It went above their head because it was poor writing in their view? Why would you think taste in writing has anything to do with their ability to understand the points the writer was trying to make? This seems unecessary and you are probably capable of coming up with a more interesting response.

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It was supposed to be a flawed protagonist.

It's commonly thought (and obvious) that Yud wrote the book about himself so I doubt it. It doesn't really fit the rationalist playbook either, they take themselves excessively seriously.

The character's author-insert aspects are self-parody.

He's too fragile and prone to overcompensation for that, nice try. Of course he's going to back track after getting mercilessly mocked for it and then claim it was just a joke.

The first few chapters have a song scene parodying ghostbusters and a joke about the protagonist biting a teacher in a tantrum as a young kid. There's plenty of elements of crackfic parody in it.

> a joke about the protagonist biting a teacher in a tantrum as a young kid.

wasn't that literally Yudkowsky, tho

Not disagreeing that Harry in the story is an author self-insert, just with that it's a fully self-serious non-parody one.

At the end Harry is basically a Messiah that can order the magical world to provide emergency medical aid to everyone in the whole world and turns Hermione into basically an angel; not really seeing the story itself saying he did anything wrong...

You're describing one of the unofficial fan-written fanfic sequels.

I saw it as an attempt at popular outreach, a puff piece for a rather niche philosophical view.

If it "goes above the head" of the people it's targeted at, that just makes it a poorly written puff piece.

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