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Harry Potter and the Methods of
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# ? Feb 22, 2015 18:34 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 19:50 |
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Captain Mog posted:Yeah, it's the same way with me. If anything, reading a good fantasy novel with great world-building challenges me to come up with my own even more. I remember back in the day when the big thing were all those stories which somehow made Cloud and Sephiroth into lovers, and I thought it was pretty odd back then, too. I was under the impression that fanfiction was mainly a late 90s/00s thing but I guess it's still going strong? Louis McMaster Bujold, a moderately successful and acclaimed sci-fi author, got her start this way - the first book of her Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor, was reskinned Star Trek fanfic, and you can still sort of tell.
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# ? Feb 22, 2015 18:36 |
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Religious tract fanfiction has a storied history as old as Pilgrim's Progress. In the introduction to the second part, the author mentions that after releasing the original work there were numerous knockoffs and unofficial sequels, something which was actually a real problem before nations started to stiffen up intellectual property laws. So fanfiction is in no way new; what's new is the fact that you can use the internet to distribute fanfiction without getting into trouble with current IP laws.
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# ? Feb 22, 2015 18:50 |
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Chapter 2: Everything I Believe Is Falsequote:
Is there a need to repeat Harry's dad's full name and title at this point? We've just had multiple mentions of said name and title one chapter ago. Wouldn't "Harry's father rolled his eyes" be sufficient? quote:
Lampshading (Harry's unchildlike language and thought processes) doesn't make it any better. If the author is aware of this and isn't writing Harry like that for comedic effect, why not just write differently? quote:
That's not very rational, is it? If evidence contradicts a theory, you shouldn't reject the evidence, you should revise the theory. quote:
That's not a very "rational" statement either. Harry doesn't yet know enough about "magic" to say what "magic" is or is not capable of doing. quote:
If you saw a person turning into a cat right in front of you, you'd be thinking "WOW!" or "HOLY poo poo!" I defy you to find anyone, anyone, who'd be thinking "The whole idea of a unified universe with mathematically regular laws, that was what had been flushed down the toilet; the whole notion of physics", let alone a 10-year old child. If living with his adoptive parents has scrubbed out his sense of wonder to such an extent, I'd say that qualifies as child abuse. quote:
Man is this incarnation of Harry an insufferable brat. quote:
That is indeed a rather terrible condition to suffer. Is this an actual thing that exists in the real world? quote:
:facepalm: I mean, I can sympathise with a child who doesn't fit into a standardised school system, but the obnoxious way that Harry talks rapidly erodes any sympathy I might have for him. quote:
For a pair of parents who "don't have any respect for Harry", they sure do talk to him like he was an adult peer instead of a child under their guardianship. quote:
Welp, that went downhill pretty fast. What seemed to be a tolerably amusing quirk of Harry in Chapter 1 has rapidly turned just downright obnoxious and insufferable in Chapter 2. How many more chapters of this are there? I hadn't checked. JosephWongKS fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Feb 22, 2015 |
# ? Feb 22, 2015 18:52 |
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The author has stated there will be 120 chapters total. The story currently stands at 600k words. gently caress it, spoiler for the central twist of the story: Harry Potter? You think a baby actually managed to kill an experienced adult wizard? That's story book logic. Harry Potter is dead. We're seeing Tom Riddle, an imperfect clone/memory copy of Lord Voldemort. Mentally, this person is a sociopathic adult in their mid-30s. Added Space fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Feb 22, 2015 |
# ? Feb 22, 2015 19:05 |
Magic can't do that, you'd have to be a god! Ever the rationalist.
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# ? Feb 22, 2015 19:10 |
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Added Space posted:The author has stated there will be 120 chapters total. The story currently stands at 600k words. In other words its a bloated mess about one and a half times longer than a Wheel of Time entry, or ten times the size of an average novel. Fun times are ahead!
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# ? Feb 22, 2015 19:22 |
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YOu're really tearin gthis thing to shreds. THis is brutal, I can't watch, it's too sick.
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# ? Feb 22, 2015 20:37 |
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JosephWongKS posted:
Hi, I'm that AI goon who was quoted on the first page. I know way too much about Yudkowsky, but I'll keep the posts to a minimum in this thread. Maybe. Dang, this one is longer than I figured when I started typing. Yudkowsky actually doesn't believe what you've posted above. He has a blog post and a few follow-ups about the rationalist technique called "defying the data". Basically it means sticking your fingers in your ears and saying lalalalalaICan'tHearYou when presented with evidence against a theory you consider foundational. The whole LW thing is all about loving with the numbers until they match whatever you wanted to believe in the first place. Here's how he does it in this case. Bayes' Law says P(X|E) = P(X) P(E|X) / P(E). X is "the thing you believe", like "people can't turn into cats". E is "the evidence", like "I saw someone turn into a cat". The output of the equation is "the likelihood of X, after I've seen E". You can see how such an equation would be handy: it is a good and clever way to teach robots how to change what they believe about the world based on what they see. However, P(X) is just "prior probability", which basically means "whatever I used to believe before I saw E". If you go ahead and plug in 1.0, dead perfect certainty, then the only possible output of the equation is 1.0. P(E|X) reduces to P(E), which cancels with the denominator and there you are. For 0.0 the same thing happens. And if you don't want to use that trick, well, it's all subjective anyway. All those probabilities come from estimates. So when you want to ignore otherwise earth shattering evidence, you make sure to inflate P(E|X) and P(E), by including the likelihood of alternate explanations like "I was hallucinating" or "my parents are gaslighting me because I'm Harry Potter Evans Verres and I deserve it." This isn't new, of course, it's not the first time a religious cult has deluded themselves by being choosy about what counts as evidence. It might be the first time they did it with math, but I'm an AI guy, not a historian.
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# ? Feb 22, 2015 21:16 |
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The author's okcupid profile was posted recently: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3699788&pagenumber=20&perpage=40#post441811924 I legitimately enjoyed the Azkaban sequence in the story. Hated Hermione's death, since the story goes quickly downhill without her. I've listened to the whole thing so far via podcast. This thread will never survive long enough.
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# ? Feb 22, 2015 21:17 |
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Added Space posted:The author has stated there will be 120 chapters total. The story currently stands at 600k words. Doesn't beat ye-olde Smash Bros fanfic which is apparently the longest written work known to man at 3,500,000+ words.
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# ? Feb 22, 2015 21:19 |
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JosephWongKS posted:
You clearly don't understand rationality. Yudowsky posted:One of the great weaknesses of Science is this mistaken idea that if an experiment contradicts the dominant theory, we should throw out the theory instead of the experiment.
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# ? Feb 22, 2015 21:20 |
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Scintilla posted:In other words its a bloated mess about one and a half times longer than a Wheel of Time entry, or ten times the size of an average novel. Fun times are ahead! This is Highfort in novel form.
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# ? Feb 22, 2015 21:59 |
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SolTerrasa posted:Yudkowsky actually doesn't believe what you've posted above. He has a blog post and a few follow-ups about the rationalist technique called "defying the data". Basically it means sticking your fingers in your ears and saying lalalalalaICan'tHearYou when presented with evidence against a theory you consider foundational. The whole LW thing is all about loving with the numbers until they match whatever you wanted to believe in the first place. Too be fair, what he's saying is that you can't overturn established theory based on a single result. This is correct, results need to be duplicated. However, this is what scientist already do. So in effect he's just blowing hot air. The proper response to what Harry has just seen would be to start documenting - get a camera and start recording. He would probably be stopped at this point. Added Space fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Feb 22, 2015 |
# ? Feb 22, 2015 22:19 |
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Religious tract fanfiction has a storied history as old as Pilgrim's Progress. In the introduction to the second part, the author mentions that after releasing the original work there were numerous knockoffs and unofficial sequels, something which was actually a real problem before nations started to stiffen up intellectual property laws. So fanfiction is in no way new; what's new is the fact that you can use the internet to distribute fanfiction without getting into trouble with current IP laws. Don't forget about that loser Dante Alighieri, whose self-insert fanfiction the Divine Comedy--where he pals around with Virgil and looks for a hot babe he barely met in person--is still taught in schools today.
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# ? Feb 22, 2015 23:02 |
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I was all set to go on an OKC safari by searching that keyword they mention, but apparently nobody uses it. I'm alright with that, really. e: Oh, I was wrong. It's nobody within 25 miles of me. Yeah, there might be some gold here. Sighence fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Feb 23, 2015 |
# ? Feb 23, 2015 00:17 |
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Mercury Hat posted:Don't forget about that loser Dante Alighieri, whose self-insert fanfiction the Divine Comedy--where he pals around with Virgil and looks for a hot babe he barely met in person--is still taught in schools today. Why is it called Dante's Inferno instead of The Divine Comedy?
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 00:19 |
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Violet_Sky posted:Why is it called Dante's Inferno instead of The Divine Comedy? Because Inferno is the first volume, there's also Purgatorio and Paradiso.
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 00:21 |
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I don't think this was posted, but even if it was, it deserves to be reposted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXARrMadTKk
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 00:58 |
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So does this thing stick with the plots of each book, or does it go about on its own thing?
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 01:27 |
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Yud is cramming his whole story into just the first year, so a few events from The Philosopher's Stone show up, but nothing beyond that.
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 01:45 |
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Moddington posted:Yud is cramming his whole story into just the first year, so a few events from The Philosopher's Stone show up, but nothing beyond that. Because I was wondering how he deals with creatures that can't exist, like Centaurs, Hippogriffs, House Elves, Giant Spiders, and Dementors. Then see him try to Port Keys, and Voldemorts resurrection. And Horcruxes.
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 01:48 |
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Davros1 posted:Because I was wondering how he deals with creatures that can't exist, like Centaurs, Hippogriffs, House Elves, Giant Spiders, and Dementors. Then see him try to Port Keys, and Voldemorts resurrection. Oh, you are going to love what this story does with Dementors.
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 02:06 |
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Davros1 posted:Because I was wondering how he deals with creatures that can't exist, like Centaurs, Hippogriffs, House Elves, Giant Spiders, and Dementors. Then see him try to Port Keys, and Voldemorts resurrection. Anything that can speak (Centaurs, goblins, house elves, etc.) is a magically created subspecies of human. Centaurs were created to isolate and maintain their genetic predisposition towards prophecy, which they project as astrology. Harry says of house elves that whoever created them was a moral monster, but all you can do now is be kind and respectful to them. Goblins show up pretty soon, and Dementors and Horcruxes form more-or-less the basis of the plot. Any physically impossible creature is explained the same way the books do, magic breaks physics.
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 02:24 |
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When Yud!Harry finds out about Parseltongue/talking to animals, he is aghast that he might accidentally eat a sentient creature. When he finds out about unicorn blood, he is aghast that no one is breeding and slaughtering these sentient creatures to prolong human lives.
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 02:37 |
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Saw thread, was inspired to go back, apparently he's actually posting the final arc. Yet another case of "reasonable concept Yud hosed up" - the Voldemort/Harry prophecy bit is kind of cool, in that Voldemort hosed up trying to overwrite Harry with Tom Riddle's personality, like the diary Horcrux, to kill him, and so the Marauder's Map shows them both as "Tom M. Riddle" and that's what's up with Harry's brain and poo poo... but, you know, handled incredibly poorly. But then it's more jacking off, I think. I skipped a bunch. Some kind of exposition where they all tell each other how smart they are and poo poo. I really want all the time I spent actually reading this poo poo to pay off and I'm certain it won't
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 02:38 |
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You think Harry would bring up Conservation of Energy when he first sees someone levitate without wires or any sort of major power source. I mean, turning someone into a cat is even crazier what with the immense amounts of energy needed to violate the Conservation of Matter like that, but still. Hell, that's a pretty good object lesson in a scientific response to an amazing discovery. After radioactivity, fusion, fission, and special relativity were explored, "Conservation of Matter," a principle going back to the 18th century, was updated to "Conservation of Mass and Energy." A true scientist should not object to an outrageous but verifiable and repeatable phenomena, he or she should object to the theories which cannot account for such phenomena. Bobbin Threadbare fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Feb 23, 2015 |
# ? Feb 23, 2015 02:53 |
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I guess I'll be that guy who likes HPMoR... I get that Yudkowsky is an egotistical fool, and that it's dumb he put all of his writing talent (go ahead and quote this with "lol") into writing a fanfiction, but I still legitimately find HPMoR entertaining to read— and with interesting ideas. Yes, sure, some of them are wrong, but many of them are intriguing at least in a philosophical sense. The sort-of "hacking the Harry Potter world" concept is fun too, and even if most of the character's actual personalities were replaced, I honestly believe that Yud is able to write characters and interactions pretty well. I guess to summarize, I doubt any of you would be desperate to hate this story so much if the author didn't have such a big head. Well, anyway, continue with the mocking. It's entertaining and points out some interesting things, even if I can't agree with the sentiment.
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 02:54 |
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The Unholy Ghost posted:I guess I'll be that guy who likes HPMoR... Counterpoint: Chapter Seven. Also, as a general comment, the tone and pacing is all over the place, to the point where I absolutely disagree that this is published-novel quality. Any editor worth his salt would have taken a chainsaw to this thing.
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 03:13 |
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The Unholy Ghost posted:I guess to summarize, I doubt any of you would be desperate to hate this story so much if the author didn't have such a big head. This is correct. There's so much bad writing out there that if Yud wasn't head of a rationality
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 03:15 |
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Darth Walrus posted:Counterpoint: Chapter Seven. Well this applies to everything, doesn't it?
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 03:16 |
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Captain Mog posted:Yeah, it's the same way with me. If anything, reading a good fantasy novel with great world-building challenges me to come up with my own even more. I remember back in the day when the big thing were all those stories which somehow made Cloud and Sephiroth into lovers, and I thought it was pretty odd back then, too. I was under the impression that fanfiction was mainly a late 90s/00s thing but I guess it's still going strong? It never went away, you just stopped paying attention to it for a decade or so.
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 05:19 |
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If it is not already the case that more fanfiction has been written in the 21st century than narrative literature of any kind in all prior human history, it will be soon.
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 05:24 |
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Wrote a short script. Average Harry Potter fan fictions look to be about 30,000 words. With 25 fics per page on fanfiction.net and ... 21895 pages, that's ... That's 16.42 billion words. Which, according to WolframAlpha is only 1% the library of congress. Some back-of-the-enveloping suggests that this accounts for something like 10-20% of the total fanfiction on the site. So 5% of the library of congress could be taken up with work from FanFiction.net #nationaltreasure I also enjoy(ed) HPMOR. Yeah it's a mary sue singulatarian wankfest, but in a way, it's the best possible mary sue singulatarian wankfest, and I respect that. Calef fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Feb 23, 2015 |
# ? Feb 23, 2015 07:40 |
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Chapter 3: Comparing Reality To Its Alternativesquote:
This feels like a totally different Harry Potter from the one in the first two chapters - actually human and likable. Was this chapter written by a guest author or something? quote:
Yup, definitely written by a guest author. quote:
Rather gratuitous pandering to D&D fans here. And not even up-to-date pandering either - AD&D was released in 1989, and by the time Eliezer started writing HPMOR in 2010, D&D 4th Edition had already been out for 2 years. quote:
That doesn't seem like a very "rational" rule. Most bookstores would stock more or less the same books as each other, and if you want to compel your children to explore and expand their horizons, you could just browse randomly through Amazon and save time that way. quote:
A return to the all-knowing 10-year old polymath Harry, though it comes off a little less jarring here given his display of humanity in the earlier part of this chapter. quote:
Not too much commentary from me on this chapter. This chapter was actually pretty decent, thanks to the guest author's much more human and much less obnoxious portrayal of Harry. I hope the guest author makes regular appearances throughout the remainder of the story. JosephWongKS fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Feb 23, 2015 |
# ? Feb 23, 2015 16:28 |
quote:Harry looked away, suddenly ashamed. "I'm sorry," he said in a small voice. "But I have a Mum and Dad. And I know that I'd just make myself unhappy by comparing that reality to... something perfect that I built up in my imagination." Yup, totally a ten year old.
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 16:35 |
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JosephWongKS posted:Rather gratuitous pandering to D&D fans here. And not even up-to-date pandering either - AD&D was released in 1989, and by the time Eliezer started writing HPMOR in 2010, D&D 4th Edition had already been out for 2 years. HP is set in the nineties.
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 16:52 |
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Mugticket posted:HP is set in the nineties. Ah yes, I'd forgotten that the first HP book was released in 1997. Then that also invalidates my comment about Amazon being the better way to browse for new books.
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 16:55 |
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JosephWongKS posted:Ah yes, I'd forgotten that the first HP book was released in 1997. Then that also invalidates my comment about Amazon being the better way to browse for new books. I think the first book is set in the beginning of nineties. Though I have no idea whether Yud knows this if he has not read them.
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# ? Feb 23, 2015 16:58 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 19:50 |
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Fanfic is a grand human tradition stretching back in time before the advent of the written word. Storytellers have always used the ideas and works of others, especially characters, to inspire them and to reach an audience familiar to the original stories. The myths and legends of Coyote and Heracles and Moses that are accepted in modern times as canon are just collated and edited fanfic of the original tales. Some dude didn't just sit down one day and write the myths of the Greek gods as a complete work. Somebody just decided to write down what the countless storytellers and socially stunted hermits were making up. What we're left with is a curated "best fanfic of 387 b.c.e." anthology. I am so ready for this thread. E: the modern bible was curated by committee and general consensus, but even today we have the apocrypha that some accept as canon and some do not. Pvt.Scott fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Feb 23, 2015 |
# ? Feb 23, 2015 18:48 |