Let's Read: "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Let's Read: "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

He hadn't for the past... how many years?

# ¿ Jul 28, 2015 12:27

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 23:56

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

I shall choose to believe McGonagall is being really sarcastic, there's a drat good reason why Time Turners are so fragile and she doesn't feel like explaining it to the most annoying 11 year old in history.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2015 08:51

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Just cause that's what he was going.for, doesn't mean that's what he wrote :colbert:

# ¿ Jul 29, 2015 08:58

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Someone once told Big Yud that what he didn't know could fill a book and by god he set out to prove it.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2015 02:32

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Why isn't she using chalk on a blackboard?

# ¿ Sep 2, 2015 16:16

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

What Yudkowsky, who doesn't know how anything works, imagines to happen, is that all your cells will suddenly be filled with molten gold. Which would be gruesome if it worked, but it doesn't.

God dammit SMBC.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2015 17:38

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Even the big accidental magic that set the whole thing off was caused by Lily's love for her son and desperate desire to protect him.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2015 01:16

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

What did I take away from it?

-Nothing to do with the actual book
-The most basic possible description of problem-solving

Thanks!

# ¿ Sep 6, 2015 13:05

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Clipperton posted:

Sure, but if simulation-me decides not to comply, what then does the AI gain out of torturing simulation-me at all?

I'm interested!

It has to follow through on the threat otherwise the gambit is meaningless.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2015 16:29

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

What the gently caress is a Worm fic.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2015 22:28

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Wasn't there some mention of other flying devices like cauldrons and carpets in the books?

# ¿ Oct 29, 2015 04:51

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Flying carpets would be too obviously weird, perhaps? Or it's some form of protectionism.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2015 21:00

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Snape always called Harry Mr Potter super sarcastically, so I imagine someone who hasn't read the books might very well think they were all doing it.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2015 08:21

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

I could see Barty Crouch pass himself from three hours in the future in the corridor and just say "Evening, Crouch."

# ¿ Apr 30, 2016 13:00

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

That Doctor Who crossover is also in dire need of an editor but at least it's been consistently interesting.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2016 22:09

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Is Quidditch even mandatory at Hogwarts? We never even hear about broomstick practice after the first lesson thanks to Harry getting scouted for the team so early.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2017 14:17

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

21 Muns posted:

To be fair, death is, like depression (the originally intended metaphor), an unpleasant thing you don't want to experience. However, he could have just as easily made dementors the embodiment of falling down the stairs, or meeting Eliezer Yudkowsky.

quote:

The Dementor's face drew closer and closer to Harry's, and even in the dim light he could faintly see, beneath the hood, the horrible empty hole that they had in place of a mouth. Closer and closer it came, until it stopped, mere inches from Harry. Then, with a gust of fetid air, it uttered a dread rattle:
"OK so at some point in the future there's going to be an omnipotent AI"

# ¿ Mar 18, 2017 07:30

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Tiggum posted:

I think the big mistake Yudkowsky makes is in assuming that Hogwarts houses matter outside of Hogwarts. Like all of Magical Britain is divided into these four factions. I could be wrong, but I think Rowling intended them to be more in line with actual school houses, ie. if you went to that school and you were in that house, you'd be trivially pleased that your kids were in it too. But your adult friends? You probably don't even know, much less care what house they were in. In fact, in the later years of school you've probably got friends in all four houses because you're starting to pay more attention to professional sport than school sports and politics rather than house rivalries, etc.

Yes, there is the thing where all dark wizards are Slytherins (if they went to school in Britain), but that's just because their defining trait is ambition and you don't turn to dark and forbidden magic if you're not ambitious. It doesn't make Slytherins. And even that's dubious, because Lockhart was pretty ambitious and terrible and he wasn't a Slytherin.

Actually I think Americans in general make much more of the houses than was intended just because their schools don't have them, so they stand out and seem important.

Uh, did the book ever say what house Lockhart was in?

# ¿ Jun 9, 2017 00:41

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

IIRC there is also mention of Wizards who tried to meddle with time and "terrible things" happened to them.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2017 10:23

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Are the weights a Dragonball thing? I think they're some kind of anime thing.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2017 16:14

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Tiggum posted:

This is supposed to be charming, isn't it?

Yeah, this reads like he's trying to write Doctor Who, Tom Baker or Matt Smith in particular.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2017 11:13

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Liquid Communism posted:

He also seized on 'Literally Wizard Hitler' Grindelwald's old allies as well, because Wizarding society apparently didn't suppress the fash after world war two the way the rest of Europe tried to.

my dude have you seen today

# ¿ Jul 22, 2018 18:22

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Cardiovorax posted:

If watching the actual Doctor Who series is anything how reading that story is like, I can understand why people like it so much. This one is basically the whole "silly whimsiness and wonder" deal that characterized the first Harry Potter book to me back when I was ten, but about three times as much so.

I'd say it absolutely nails what you'd expect from the internal voice of the Eleventh Doctor. The stories themselves, eh, sometimes, but Doctor Who suffers when it goes too far in that direction. And the other lead actors are fairly madcap and wacky, but none quite as much as the living cartoon that is Matt Smith's Eleven.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo2RKAHu-kI

# ¿ Aug 1, 2018 20:14

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Pvt.Scott posted:

The example of sapient ants trying to understand a human is a good one. How is a eusocial creature that communicates chemically even going to speak to a living god-being who communicates through sound, symbols and movement, let alone share any sort of commonalities in language concepts? Individuality would be a completely foreign concept, as an example. A human�s life-span would also be incomprehensible

E: this is a common metaphor for the relation of humans to Lovecraftian gods

In that case, wouldn't you be communicating with the colony rather than with any individual ant? They'd understand separate colonies, and what are we if not colonies of cells?

# ¿ Aug 17, 2018 16:58

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

It's likely that Riddle's diary was already magicked up to the gills, since it works as a pensieve despite being made of paper, and Voldemort only chose extremely significant items to be horcruxes. Memories plus a fragment of a soul plus whatever it took from Ginny...

# ¿ Nov 19, 2018 19:47

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

The Iron Rose posted:

Yeah the entire point of worm is the ridiculous escalation. It's definitely a flawed work and would be better at about half as long, but it's a pretty fun ride. It's Apocalyptic fiction and honestly I dig that.

Also as an original work it takes a ton more creativity than this poo poo. Then again, I suppose for all of Yud's flaws that make him a burning trashfire hack of a man, he's at least creative. AI's torturing simulations to influence the past? You can't make that poo poo up

Yud didn't come up with that, sex pest Roko did. Yud just uncritically bought into it and banned all discussion of it from his cult to stop it "infecting" people.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2019 20:20

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 23:56

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Daikloktos posted:

Absolutely, and it's interesting you put "we" instead of "one". One of the idiosyncratic things about Yudkowsky, among the many, is that by never reading beyond the 3rd or 4th book he got to experience the latter half of the series this way through fanfiction. And it was the first pop literary hit of the internet age that could facilitate experiencing a work that way. Maybe back in Don Quixote times you'd end up reading more romantic knight stories written by proto-goons than actual medieval whatever, or Dickens fanclubs and Star Trek fanzines, but size and scope and scale, and not so readily in replacement of the originals.

And that Yud attempts to write not just a rationalization of Harry Potter, but a metatextual rationalization of Harry Potter through the lens of its fanfiction is one of the elements of the work that elevate it. As with every grand theme he attempts, it is half-constructed and easily abandoned, but I recognize the impulse. "The consistency we could create"...

But ultimately we already have that, as I mentioned, in the fanfiction body as a whole. I believe there was some bruhahah about trying to enter the entire aooo into the contest, which I agree was not entirely sound. But I have read Harry Potter fanfics (branching from you guys "guilty pleasures" you posted here and there over the years, I see each and every one of you now) that do a fantastic job providing consistency of agency, geopolitic, and cosmology to whatever particular aspect of the series most drew its authors - Harry raised by Goblins, Harry becomes Snape's bickering lab assistant, Harry becomes a BYOB communist because we all knew this JK Rowling poo poo was coming.

But when any singular author creates a holistic world, or extends anothers holistic world, they are naturally going to imbue their own perceptions and biases about what elements and philosophies are important to draw out. This relation between creator and subcreator, and metatexually the relation between author and God, is central to Tolkien's Silmarillion cosmology - but check those guys out if you want to know more about Tolkien, it's one of the most legit threads in forums history.

We can see an object example of this in another element worthy of praise in Methods, the Interdict of Merlin. I have not read enough fanfic to understand any potential antecedents, but it's one of those rare bits where Yudjkowsky remembers his most essential premise and provides a continuous patch to an element of dissonance in the framework of the original. That is: A culture constantly reaching back to the a past age of epic glory while having an extensive academic, literary and research landscape. Cosmologically it allows for artifacts unreplicable yet a "crunchy" (ugh) casting system; geosociopolitically it fills in the history with unfathomable disasters that end up, serendipitously, solving elements such as population size

Yet, it is also a vehicle for Yud to explore that element of existence most important to him: existential risk. Merlin becomes twisted to Yud's purposes so far afield because Yud is "uniquely outsider as an artist", but any work will see its characters and devices shaded towards what the author thinks most. Targeting any such "rationalization" towards not the work itself, but its body of fanfiction tropes and standouts, very neatly democratizes that ideal of extended the world of the work beyond its original author, solving this inherent contradiction.

I probably wrote a thousand words there so here's my post in picture form

tl: dr

# ¿ Jul 10, 2020 06:24

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Let's Read: "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"