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Added Space posted:The most obvious is the whole "scientific investigation of magic", which lasted all of one chapter before things defaulted to "whatever the main character imagines is correct". the thing is: for all his pontificating, if you look at Yud's actions, he doesn't actually believe in science. He's an aristotlean -- he makes blind assertions about how the world works, then builds castles in the air on those foundations. that's how you get things like Roko's basilisk. utterly disconnected from reality, but, if you take all of's yud unexamined axioms as true, then sure, it makes sense. unfortunately for yud, while writing super verbose reality fanfiction may be good for building internet cults, it's not actually a very good way to accomplish things. That's why he's produced like 2 papers in the past decade. And they were both just fairly bland math papers, never practical results. Because the world, sometimes, doesn't behave how you expect. That's why you do, like, experiments. HPMOR, then, lets Harezier inhabit a world where blindly asserting things is actually an effective. because Elezier is pulling the strings so that his assumptions are always right. wow, marvel at how smart this kid is, he's so smart he can just magically pull facts about the universe out of his rear end and they turn out to be true, woah!! follow my 5000 word guide to learn how to do this IRL. this also ties in to why he thinks conspiratorial brainwashing is the ideal way to do science. See, if he was actually trying to get results, he'd run into the fact that you *need* lots of support, infrastructure, and collaboration to do effective science -- it's just too difficult to handle on your own. But he's not trying to do science, he's trying to grift money out of his personal cult; and brainwashing's great for that. (all this might seem to contradict his fanboying of bayesianism, but it's actually perfectly consistent. The secret of bayesianism is that you can set your "priors" to whatever you want. You can always set your confidence level so high enough that no evidence can change it; then your priors become, for all intents and purposes, axioms.) animist fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Aug 21, 2019 |
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Aug 21, 2019 07:15
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yeah it's fine for magic to be confusing and unpredictable, that's how cultural constructs of magic were treated for the majority of history in most societies. you just gotta sell it, make it awe-inspiring or scary. if you're jumping through hoops to make your magic rigorous and predictable to the decimal point, you're writing science fiction, not fantasy. (imo Harry Potter pulls off wonderment well enough where it counts, it's not trying to be robust. HPMOR, on the other hand, aims for rigor. But it doesn't substantively change the system from HP, beyond a lot of sarcastic eye rolling about "isn't this silly". so it's neither good science fiction nor good fantasy.) animist fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Jul 8, 2020 |
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Jul 8, 2020 23:17
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Cardiovorax posted:Correction: it claims to aim for rigor, but when it comes to Harry Potter fanfics that are written around the idea of scientifically investigating magic, it's actually one of the worst around. Harriezer pulls new powers of his rear end exactly when the plot demands it, no sooner and no later. There is no more rhyme or reason to it than to anything the novels also do. but there was a quiz at the end!!
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Jul 8, 2020 23:26
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