Wait... Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was written by Eliezer Yudkowsky? So that means he wrote that totally straight and its not a joke?
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.