quote:

Time reversed matter is equivalent to anti-matter - Yes. Physics is correct.

Tunicate posted:

quote:

Chapter 14
Time reversed matter is equivalent to anti-matter - Yes. Physics is correct.

Not accurate, as we've known about CP violations since 1964. Cronin and Fitch won a Nobel for it.

Darth Walrus posted:

Permission to go slightly off-topic and talk about another phenomenon in what I'll hesitantly call Harry Potter fanfic 'culture'? It doesn't have much to do with HPMOR's subject matter and particular breed of insanity, but it's an interesting companion piece with some notable parallels, and an amazingly deep well of crazy.

Darth Walrus posted:

Permission to go slightly off-topic and talk about another phenomenon in what I'll hesitantly call Harry Potter fanfic 'culture'? It doesn't have much to do with HPMOR's subject matter and particular breed of insanity, but it's an interesting companion piece with some notable parallels, and an amazingly deep well of crazy.

quote:

And beside Draco, Harry walked along with a smile on his face, thinking about the evolutionary origins of human intelligence.

In the beginning, before people had quite understood how evolution worked, they'd gone around thinking crazy ideas like human intelligence evolved so that we could invent better tools.

The reason why this was crazy was that only one person in the tribe had to invent a tool, and then everyone else would use it, and it would spread to other tribes, and still be used by their descendants a hundred years later. That was great from the perspective of scientific progress, but in evolutionary terms, it meant that the person who invented something didn't have much of a fitness advantage, didn't have all that many more children than everyone else. Only relative fitness advantages could increase the relative frequency of a gene in the population, and drive some lonely mutation to the point where it was universal and everyone had it. And brilliant inventions just weren't common enough to provide the sort of consistent selection pressure it took to promote a mutation. It was a natural guess, if you looked at humans with their guns and tanks and nuclear weapons and compared them to chimpanzees, that the intelligence was there to make the technology. A natural guess, but wrong.

Before people had quite understood how evolution worked, they'd gone around thinking crazy ideas like the climate changed, and tribes had to migrate, and people had to become smarter in order to solve all the novel problems.

quote:

But human beings had four times the brain size of a chimpanzee. 20% of a human's metabolic energy went into feeding the brain. Humans were ridiculously smarter than any other species. That sort of thing didn't happen because the environment stepped up the difficulty of its problems a little. Then the organisms would just get a little smarter to solve them. Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits.

And today's scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been.

Harry had once read a famous book called Chimpanzee Politics. The book had described how an adult chimpanzee named Luit had confronted the aging alpha, Yeroen, with the help of a young, recently matured chimpanzee named Nikkie. Nikkie had not intervened directly in the fights between Luit and Yeroen, but had prevented Yeroen's other supporters in the tribe from coming to his aid, distracting them whenever a confrontation developed between Luit and Yeroen. And in time Luit had won, and become the new alpha, with Nikkie as the second most powerful...

...though it hadn't taken very long after that for Nikkie to form an alliance with the defeated Yeroen, overthrow Luit, and become the new new alpha.

It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity.

'Cause, y'know, a human would have totally seen that one coming.

Cingulate posted:

I'd say winning over others via your nerd smarts to establish a philosopher king hierarchy is a typical nerd dream. Contrast with the "feminine", soft and mushy and un-cool cooperation, coexistence, and harmony.

divabot posted:

ehh, I always liked the social brain hypothesis. It feels like it explains so much of what I see around me, and I like the idea that quantum physics, our huge complicated technological civilisation and lesbian internet porn are mere side-effects of trying to talk the other chimp into giving you the banana. But I admit it's still pretty drat speculative.

divabot posted:

And remembering that it goes back a decade or so.

HPMOR is seriously the most popular HP fic ever. If it got an honestly-garnered 2016 Hugo "Best Fanwork" nomination (and not "Best Novel", I mean gently caress off), that wouldn't be a disgrace to the rocket. For the genre it's not bad. It's when you add the serious intent and the author's delusions that it becomes champagne comedy.

But how did it become by far the most popular? Note it wasn't LessWrongers spamming it, it was HP fans coming to LW. Was there pent-up demand for "approaching HP magic as science", even if it didn't deliver? What was going on here vis a vis the HP fandom itself?

divabot posted:

And remembering that it goes back a decade or so.

HPMOR is seriously the most popular HP fic ever. If it got an honestly-garnered 2016 Hugo "Best Fanwork" nomination (and not "Best Novel", I mean gently caress off), that wouldn't be a disgrace to the rocket. For the genre it's not bad. It's when you add the serious intent and the author's delusions that it becomes champagne comedy.

But how did it become by far the most popular? Note it wasn't LessWrongers spamming it, it was HP fans coming to LW. Was there pent-up demand for "approaching HP magic as science", even if it didn't deliver? What was going on here vis a vis the HP fandom itself?

divabot posted:

And remembering that it goes back a decade or so.

HPMOR is seriously the most popular HP fic ever. If it got an honestly-garnered 2016 Hugo "Best Fanwork" nomination (and not "Best Novel", I mean gently caress off), that wouldn't be a disgrace to the rocket. For the genre it's not bad. It's when you add the serious intent and the author's delusions that it becomes champagne comedy.

But how did it become by far the most popular? Note it wasn't LessWrongers spamming it, it was HP fans coming to LW. Was there pent-up demand for "approaching HP magic as science", even if it didn't deliver? What was going on here vis a vis the HP fandom itself?

anilEhilated posted:

Makes one wonder what is it that forces fanfiction authors to write books you can clobber cows with. I guess they just don't plan the whole story beforehand so they keep extending it?

Darth Walrus posted:

anilEhilated posted:

what the poo poo

Darth Walrus posted:

OK, time for that big ol' effortpost I promised. Think Yudkowsky's magnum opus is crazy? You ain't seen nothing yet.

Two years before Methods of Rationality, the big thing in Harry Potter fanfic was Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness, a 250,000-word monster (50,000 words bigger than the book it was theoretically based off, though positively svelte compared to HPMOR's bloated 660,000) about the adventures of Neville Longbottom and the Hogwarts resistance during the seventh and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. DAYD was laser-targeted to appeal to Harry Potter's teenage fandom - it was a dark, angsty, melodramatic power-fantasy following a fan-favourite character through one of the most intriguing unexplored parts of the Harry Potter saga. As a result, it' hard to exaggerate how big it was - it never achieved the mainstream presence of HPMOR, but it had an army of fans, the 'DAYDians', and even its own small convention, DAYDcon. Even now, after all the poo poo that's gone down, there are around two hundred people in fanfiction.net's DAYD community.

Then, in 2009, the mock-site fandom_wank discovered that Andrew 'Thanfiction' Blake, the author of DAYD, was also the individual known variously as Jordan Wood, Amy Player, and Victoria Bitter, the Lord of the Rings megafan and cult leader who was convicted of charity fraud for his role in the Tentmoot debacle, and poo poo hit the fan. Now, this requires a bit of backstory, but I promise we'll get back to Harry Potter fanfic eventually.

Blake was born as Amy Player, a Virginian from what by all reports was a loving, well-adjusted family. Despite this, he had psychological issues from an early age, and became unhealthily attached to various works of fiction including, eventually, Lord of the Rings. He dropped out of college and dived straight into the fandom, using his charisma and formidable manipulative talents to gather a group of close-knit devotees with ties to both LOTR and Wicca including a theologically confused young woman in a failing job and a failing marriage named Abbey 'Orangeblossom' Stone. He spun all sorts of wild fantasies for them, claiming that he was a 'paladin' for a mysterious goddess and could communicate with the dead. Then he could channel the dead, letting them speak through him. Then he could do the same thing for living people. Then he started explaining that due to the heavy influence of European myth on Tolkein's work, the Lord of the Rings and its companion texts was a fictionalised account of the history of the world, much like what Robert Howard claimed with his Conan novels. Like the Bible with a couple of extra degrees of separation. That logically (ahem) meant that the characters in it might have been based on real people, and guess who he'd just started channeling?

Yup, the guy founded a cult based around him being possessed by Frodo Baggins.

OK, that's not quite accurate. He was possessed by Elijah Wood. To be clear, he'd been born female, but wanted to transition, and he explained this to his cult (who were now in so deep and so isolated from the rest of the world that they'd swallow anything he fed them) as his old female personality being killed and replaced by the spirit of a Hollywood actor who served as a conduit to a small primordial being with big hairy feet.

Yeah.

Amy Player got his sex change, and started calling himself Jordan Wood (as in, Elijah Jordan Wood). He figured his cult had been marinating long enough, and were sufficiently insulated from reality that he no longer needed to artificially shelter them from it. With them as his core, he founded Bit of Earth, a popular Lord of the Rings fansite ostensibly designed to direct LOTR nerds' energies towards charitable work, and marketed himself as Elijah Wood's cousin, with a history in both child acting and the IRA (yes, the one with the bombs). Bit of Earth engaged in several projects, some successful, most not, and eventually launched Tentmoot 2003, a massively ambitious five-day convention where the profits were supposed to go to the literacy charity Reading Is Fundamental. It was a total disaster, with LOTR actors stranded in airports across the globe and devoted fans/cult members having to fork out ludicrous amounts of money to patch things up as more and more arrangements Blake/Player/Wood had promised to make failed to materialise. He locked himself in his hotel room, threatening suicide, and by the time the dust settled, there was a $3,000 black hole where Reading is Fundamental's profits were supposed to be that nobody could account for. To add icing to the cake, the Player family then showed up reporting a missing-persons case - they had received a long, dramatic suicide note about how their daughter Amy wanted to end her life after her girlfriend Abbey had run off with the villainously suave Jordan Wood. The police reaction when they found out the truth was predictable, and Blake is no longer allowed in the state of Oregon.

Tentmoot marked the end of Blake's high-profile involvement in Lord of the Rings. He retreated back into his cult, which got weirder and more controlling by the day. Eventually, it fell apart, as more and more of his disciples escaped and got help. Abbey Stone, his girlfriend, finally burned out in 2007 after a disastrous attempt by the cult to flee to Canada and start a new life there, reconnecting with her family and requesting their help (which was made a bit awkward because she'd cut them off in 2004 at Blake's behest after he gaslighted her into falsely recalling memories of extensive parental abuse). They bailed her out, got her away from him, and put her on an extensive cult reprogramming course, letting her slowly become a functional member of society again.

One year later, Andrew Blake emerged in the Harry Potter fandom with DAYD, back to his old tricks. The story was based on the narrative he'd created for his old cult after the whole Lord of the Rings thing fell through, about a group of child soldiers in World War II, and the DAYDians became a fresh recruiting ground for a fresh cult. His new name was taken from a hardcore porn director in order to thwart Googling by vengeful cult members and scam victims, and he presented himself as a cisgender man with an unusual disorder that prevented his body from absorbing testosterone (and also an ex-IRA spirit warrior, because of course). Abbey Stone (now Willson, thanks to a new and much more successful marriage) became 'Louise' (her middle name), the ex-girlfriend from hell who had cruelly snatched away their son during their breakup (actually a sparrow that the cult had raised together). Soon, he was back to isolating his devotees and channelling the fanfic's characters for them, as the sequels to DAYD got stranger and more divorced from Harry Potter canon (the second story, Sluagh, featured Seamus Finnegan travelling to war-torn Belfast to knife-fight an ancient Celtic demon). When the fandom_wank revelations came out, Blake waved them away by explaining that Amy Player, the villain of Tentmoot, had been his evil twin, then admitted he was Amy Player, then issued lachrymose apologies, then arranged DAYDcon (which was a mess, but not a Tentmoot-level mess), and then announced his retirement from the Internet.

Then poo poo got real.

In May 2011, Jason Eisenberg shot his wife, Brittany Quinn, and two of her roommates before suiciding. The only survivor, who escaped with minor injuries, was Andrew Blake. Quinn had been the new Abbey Willson, a woman in an unhappy marriage who was drawn into Blake's cult (she was a DAYDian) and convinced to let him live with/sponge off her. She'd cut off her family and extorted money from her husband with lurid tales of abuse that sounded suspiciously similar to the letters Willson and her fellow Lord of the Rings cultists had been told to write to their families by Blake. Blake responded with by forming a domestic-abuse charity with the unintentionally revealing name of 'It's About Power', and organising a hike along the Trail of Tears in Brittany's memory. Details are hazy, but the cult members who went along hint that it didn't end well.

Soon afterwards, Willson, now recovered, started blogging about her experiences with Blake in a series of posts aptly entitled 'The Crazy Train', reaching out to DAYDians still in the cult and explaining her ex's long and sordid history. This triggered a series of cult members coming out with their own stories, including another member of Willson's LOTR cult and a couple of ex-DAYDians.

The Quinn murder was the second Tentmoot, striking a fatal blow to Blake's presence in a second fandom. The DAYDians are still operational, but they're going the way the LOTR cult did as he loses interest. His new game is Supernatural, where he's embedded himself in the 'Destiel' community, focused on the fan-favourite pairing of Dean Winchester and the angel Castiel. Things haven't gone as smoothly this time around, as the Internet has become used to his tricks, and even the infamously deranged Supernatural fandom (Google 'omegaverse' to see what I mean, and bring mindbleach) aren't biting as hard as they might. Nevertheless, he's got an new young woman to sponge off, a rapt inner circle, and plenty of stories of channelling angels to go around. It's only a matter of time until poo poo gets bad again.

So yeah, that's the DAYD story. Methods of Rationality wasn't the first time Harry Potter fanfic was used as a cult recruitment tool, and for all that's bad about Yudkowsky's word-vomit, at least it hasn't got someone killed yet.

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

Unlimited enthusiasm, but limited tendency to seek out editors.

Liquid Communism posted:

And an even more limited pool of decent editors willing to do work for the pay that a fanfic author can give them (ie nothing).

quote:

"Frigideiro! " said Hermione again from the desk next to him. Her water was solid ice and there were white crystals forming on the rim of her glass. She seemed to be totally intent on her own work and not at all conscious of the other students staring at her with hateful eyes, which was either (a) dangerously oblivious of her or (b) a perfectly honed performance rising to the level of fine art.

"Oh, very good, Miss Granger!" squeaked Filius Flitwick, their Charms Professor and Head of Ravenclaw, a tiny little man with no visible signs of being a past dueling champion. "Excellent! Stupendous!"

Harry had expected to be, in the worst case, second behind Hermione. Harry would have preferred for her to be rivalling him, of course, but he could have accepted it the other way around.

As of Monday, Harry was headed for the bottom of the class, a position for which he was companionably rivalling all the other Muggle-raised students except Hermione. Who was all alone and rivalless at the top, poor thing.

Professor Flitwick was standing over the desk of one of the other Muggleborns and quietly adjusting the way she was holding her wand.

Harry looked over at Hermione. He swallowed hard. It was the obvious role for her in the scheme of things... "Hermione?" Harry said tentatively. "Do you have any idea what I might be doing wrong?"

Hermione's eyes lit up with a terrible light of helpfulness and something in the back of Harry's brain screamed in desperate humiliation.

quote:

Five minutes later, Harry's water did seem noticeably cooler than room temperature and Hermione had given him a few verbal pats on the head and told him to pronounce it more carefully next time and gone off to help someone else.

Professor Flitwick had given her a House point for helping him.

Harry was gritting his teeth so hard his jaw ached and that wasn't helping his pronunciation.

I don't care if it's unfair competition. I know exactly what I am doing with two extra hours every day. I am going to sit in my trunk and study until I am keeping up with Hermione Granger.

The Iron Rose posted:

Also props to whoever recommended the arithmancer. It's actually not terrible!

LowellDND posted:

Hermione in Arithmancer is working on spells and science literally every chapter, and when she discovers something she publishes in a journal. Methinks this Hermione is a bit better at science.

Pavlov posted:

This is because Yudkowsky does not actually want magic that works like science. He wants science that works like magic.

Night10194 posted:

I think one reason so many of these singulitarian booster types either never went to college or failed at science in college is because of this. I dropped out of Biochemistry to study history, myself, because once I got in enough I A: Discovered I absolutely can't do Calc 3 and have a hell of a time with Organic Chemistry and B: Even if I could've, I wasn't enjoying that kind of work enough to want to do the sheer amount of grunt work on it that science requires. Like, science is both intellectually difficult, but it requires a lot of passion because there's a hell of a lot of hard, repetitive work involved (just like any form of research) and if you don't enjoy it or just instantly want results you're going to be miserable. I enjoy history and religious studies enough to be happy reading through hundreds of pages of old philosophy or combing religious texts for citations and textual support, but wouldn't have felt the same about biochem and lab work. Guys like Yud, I feel, are essentially writing about how disappointed they are that science doesn't work like it does in science fiction and Hollywood. "Why can't I be the supreme master of the mind who is so smart he can manipulate everyone and instantly reasons his way through the plot?" and "Science should be all about being smart enough and enabling all my dreams, not all this boring hard work and study."

LowellDND posted:

As I recall, his other short story about the Bayesian Conspiracy is angry at 'the old methods of science' that took 30 years to get it right, as opposed to just thinking the right thing early on. Its very 'early Greek philosophy' imho.

Hate Fibration posted:

This is not at all surprising, since as has been remarked before, Yudkowsky basically treats science as a gnostic religion. Something with revealed truths that are only passed on to initiates.

quote:

"Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous magic you will learn at Hogwarts," said Professor McGonagall. There was no trace of any levity upon the face of the stern old witch. "Anyone messing around in my class will leave and not come back. You have been warned."

Her wand came down and tapped her desk, which smoothly reshaped itself into a pig. A couple of Muggleborn students gave out small yelps. The pig looked around and snorted, seeming confused, and then became a desk again.

The Transfiguration Professor looked around the classroom, and then her eyes settled on one student. "Mr. Potter," said Professor McGonagall. "You only received your schoolbooks a few days ago. Have you started reading your Transfiguration textbook?"

"No, sorry professor," Harry said.

"You needn't apologise, Mr. Potter, if you were required to read ahead you would have been told to do so." McGonagall's fingers rapped the desk in front of her. "Mr. Potter, would you care to guess whether this is a desk which I Transfigured into a pig, or if it began as a pig and I briefly removed the Transfiguration? If you had read the first chapter of your textbook, you would know."

Harry's eyebrows furrowed slightly. "I'd guess it'd be easier to start with a pig, since if it started as a desk, it might not know how to stand up."

Professor McGonagall shook her head. "No fault to you, Mr. Potter, but the correct answer is that in Transfiguration you do not care to guess. Wrong answers will be marked with extreme severity, questions left blank will be marked with great leniency. You must learn to know what you do not know.

quote:

If I ask you any question, no matter how obvious or elementary, and you answer 'I'm not sure', I will not hold it against you and anyone who laughs will lose House points. Can you tell me why this rule exists, Mr. Potter?"

Because a single error in Transfiguration can be incredibly dangerous. "No."

"Correct. Transfiguration is more dangerous than Apparition, which is not taught until your sixth year. Unfortunately, Transfiguration must be learned and practised at a young age to maximise your adult ability. So this is a dangerous subject, and you should be quite scared of making any mistakes, because none of my students have ever been permanently injured and I will be extremely put out if you are the first class to spoil my record."

divabot posted:

The Reddit thread meltdown continues, on Tumblr. nostalgebraist sums up the problem. Do click on all the "reblogged this from" below with comments, there's a fascinating conversation going on there. (I post here with stuff I said in this thread.) The disappointed cultists are particularly delicious, e.g. this one lamenting that Yudkowsky has strayed from Yudkowsky's path.

Mazzletoff posted:

[*]Bashing. Big Yud dislikes Ron a lot, for no explicable reason - the only characters who really go it alone without getting viciously re-characterized for the purpose of Yudkowsky's dislike are pretty much just Fred and George.

YggiDee posted:

Okay this Arithmancer story is pretty cool but it's literally half a million words long and that's the sort of thing you warn someone about before they start.