His weirdo Harry Potter fanfic is 600,000 words long, which is the combined length of the first five real harry Potter books.
The ridiculousness of it all serves as a type of hazing ritual. To enter the cool club you have to grit your way through it and also The Sequenced.
Most people tap out early. Those who persevere get to join the cool kid’s club, where they haze others into reading it all too.
Are you sure “cool” is the correct adjective?
Then author got his diva moment, at least this is how I remember it. He constructed some impossible to solve situation and had tantrum that if readers won’t give answer how one of protagonists will solve it, author will stop writing the book. I think it had even time limit for readers.
After that I dropped the book and never returned to it.
Most fans loved that challenge. We're you worried? Angry? Either way you just had to wait for the next installment.
Strange that you dont remember that the protagonist was the titular Harry Potter.
I tried to remember who was challenged, but I wasn't sure and my main candidate now was Snape.
No. My exposure to HPMOR was a very long time ago from an eccentric coworker and his friends who tried to get me to read it. I curiously read a little bit and couldn’t believe people were taking it seriously.
Then I Googled it and found lively discussions from rationalists bending over backward to defend the part of HPMOR where Draco says he’s going to rape someone, and noped right out of that entire subgenre of the internet for years.
I do think it’s fascinating how the rationalists are so unwilling to accept that people may not resonate with their material that everyone who disagrees is assumed to be part of an ideological outgroup with bad intentions. Sneer Club is a tiny subreddit that appears basically inactive?
Why would you presume that the only way for someone to dislike HPMOR is to be indoctrinated by a tiny subreddit instead of having their own opinion? I suppose it tracks that rationalists would view ideologies as being sourced from groups and communities and look for group membership to assign someone’s opinion to, rather than accepting that someone might be able to form their own independent opinions.
You either dedicated quite a lot of effort to somehow get this statistic (unlikely), or make things up, or acquired the attitude from a place that was quite active at the time.
I felt I could make a single guess about a single person.
Got through the end, not a believer in anything. Not only your statement is wrong (because most absolute statements are) even the weakened statement of most who finished are believers is likely wrong because likely most people who read it are just fanfics enthusiasts like me.
> The ridiculousness of it all serves as a type of hazing ritual.
I have read way worse btw.
Like, you could still have the different members of the forge and lean into a single source of the tech. Warhammer 40K could fit, given Tetra and some of the initial abilities/power. So you could keep most/a lot of the summit meeting events.
Sorry but I don’t believe that HPMOR holds a particular draw to normal Harry Potter fanfic readers.
The parts I read were basically Yudkowsky doing a self-insert into the book and trying to dress rationalist lecturing up with Harry Potter themes.
> I have read way worse btw.
That’s about the level of endorsement I’d expect for that book. “Technically, even worse writing exists”
Believe as you wish but I found about it through r/HPfanfiction.
> That’s about the level of endorsement I’d expect for that book. “Technically, even worse writing exists”
It is a fanfiction, you shouldn't expect a good published book level writing. Sturgeon's law apply very strongly to fanfiction.
However, I wouldn’t call it “long” in the same way that I wouldn’t call The Count of Monte Cristo or Great Expectations long. Serialized stories are just naturally longer because readers want a sizable chunk every week/month, regardless of that inflating the total size or not.
It's not just relevant because Yudkowsky wrote it, it's relevant because it essentially serves as Rationalism's "Torah".
Is it perhaps possible one of these is not like the others?
I've seen Rationalists defend it against very fair and accurate criticisms (see this whole thread for some of those), completely failing to recognize the complaints and objections are often legitimate.
I believe I've seen people cite it as the thing that brought them into the Rationalist community.
It's not uncommon to see people quote it in varying capacities - as a reminder of what "good rationality" looks like, as a cultural shibboleth, as a criticism of an idea they disagree with, and more. As an ex-evangelical who's read the Protestant Bible well over five times, this behavioral pattern looks very, very familiar.
I'm not going to spend the hours digging to find actual evidence I'm correct, and it's possible I'm being unfair and misremembering. I'm just a guy on the Internet - don't take this as anything other than "Here's my recollection. Take it for what it's worth."
The label of "Torah" did not strike me as wrong, though.
The rest of it, not so much. Of course I've seen people say positive things about it, and I've seen people say more positive things about it than I think it deserves. But that, too, is very different from treating it as a holy text; surely the same is true of pretty much anything that a lot of people have read and liked.
I just did a search for comments on LessWrong in the last year that contain the string "HPMOR" -- unsurprisingly there are hundreds of them, so I looked at the first few pages of results. I found a fair amount of "X reminded me of Y in HPMOR" but nothing that looked (to me; of course I might have blind spots) as if the thing was being treated like sacred scripture. E.g., no instances of "you say X, but HPMOR says Y, so obviously you're wrong" or the like.
It feels to me less like the way Christians relate to the Bible and more like the way they relate to, say, the works of C S Lewis. A shared bit of culture that can be referred to; something a lot of them like; in some cases the thing that brought them "into the fold".
Maybe I've just failed to notice. Maybe I've noticed in the past but forgotten. (I'm pretty good at forgetting things.) Maybe the search I just did was the wrong one -- e.g., maybe for some reason rationalists treating HPMOR as scripture tend not to call it "HPMOR" while doing so. But so far I remain unconvinced.
I'm not sure that's the case here, because rationalist fanfics tend to instead try to tear down the world as illogical.
Example for Harry Potter and this fanfic. In Harry Potter magical currency is made of precious metals and there are bronze coints, silver coins and gold coins. And they have fixed exchange rate.
"But wait!", notices the rationalist. "Since those coins could theoretically be melted down, and rates for those metals on exchange is different I could make infinite money glitch and crash the economy. Those wizards are so dumb, haha, for thousands of years they never figured out the basic logic."
Congratulations you found an economical inconsistency in a children's book. Your next period is boxing against kindergartners.
In my mind if you were a fan of original work, you would not be doing this. You could find different explanation that does not try to paint the world as stupid. Simplest being https://xkcd.com/1494/
Besides there are other HP fan fics in this range
Sometimes it is the question. "Yes" is the answer.