2026-08-24 21:13 UTC
Replies (6)
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@davidgerard@circumstances.run 2026-08-24 21:53
@mxchara@cyberpunk.lol If you do read HPMOR, read chapters 1-30 then start again at chapter 100. you'll miss a few things, but mostly you'll miss 70 chapters of complete shit. worse books have been published by real authors. it's better than atlas shrugged. it won't really educate you as to yudkowsky's crazy though. it will allude to it, but it's not the secret. if you go back and read ch 31-99, it will not really elucidate what is not present in the rest, it will just make you think "what a fucked up weirdo who did a fic with not one but *two* Mary Sues" perhaps the sequences will do that, one million words of blog posts over three years. but that's where all the crazy that HPMOR is an allusion to actually lives. i read through the sequences three times because i dunno i had too much time on my hands. I can definitely say that to read yudkowsky is not to be convinced. if you do wish to set about this tedious abyss dive, read the original blog posts and the *comments*, which often take apart yud's dumb shit. you will need to show the heavily downvoted comments because the cultists have dutifully attempted to obscure them. before reading either i suggest Neoreaction A Basilisk by Elizabeth Sandifer, which is actually enjoyable and written by a nice person, who will introduce you to all this much better than the primary texts. and i'm not just saying that because my name is in the first sentence.
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@bstacey@icosahedron.website 2026-08-24 22:31
@mxchara@cyberpunk.lol The prose of HPMoR is nearly as insufferable as the characters, the "science" is frequently wrong (in the way that an autodidact who never had to pass a test or get graded will inevitably turn out wrong), and the engagement with the source material---including its flaws---is superficial. It's fanfic of a fan wiki, meant to teach "Rationality(TM)" rather than science. https://awful.systems/post/5169331
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@zwol@masto.hackers.town 2026-08-25 00:21
@mxchara@cyberpunk.lol For what little it's worth, I tried to read HPMoR when it was first being posted. I got about two chapters in, and gave up, because (a) that version of Harry was too insufferable to put up with, (b) the author's prose style was *also* too insufferable (and clunky) to put up with, and (c) the "rationality" in the title was... hollow, is the best I can describe it umpteen years later. Not enough philosophical substance even to make a decent strawman.
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@theogrin@chaosfem.tw 2026-08-25 01:18
@mxchara@cyberpunk.lol If there is one thing about HPMoR which has stuck with me, more than that rationalism is in short supply within the story... it's that the chief plot device which leads to the ultimate conclusion, established as a shining moment of brilliance which somehow occurs to an eleven-year-old who's just read enough books, is a perfectly sensible mechanism within a fantasy world but falls apart rather quickly within the boundaries of non-fictional reality and a world dispossessed of magic and/or time travel. It is also precisely the batshit Yudkowsky theory which led to the concept of Roko's Basilisk, and one which he seems to fundamentally believe. Other than that, it's an HP fanfic, so maybe avoid it because of that, too.
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@davidculley@hachyderm.io 2026-08-25 11:58
@mxchara@cyberpunk.lol I'm glad that someone else (you) also talks about how very far on the right Lex Fridman is. Maybe it's just my social circles and others don't really watch or even know Fridman, but among my co-workers many watch Lex Fridman. I don't even live near Silicon Valley, I live in Germany. I must admit, I watched his podcast myself until 2023 when I finally became disillusioned. When he platformed more and more political guests, including JFK Jr., Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Balaji Srinivasan, Narendra Modi, Javier Milei, etc. and no longer "just": - scientists and "scientists", - Effective Altruists (of which most people hadn't heard of yet in 2023), - Elon Musk (whom most people still considered a genius at the time of him being interviewed), - cultists (like Aella), - AGI boosters it should have become obvious even to the more oblivious folks what the agenda of Fridman is. But strangely many people still watch him (and grifter Andrew Huberman) in 2026, and when I point out the problems with these "celebrities", people get weirdly defensive. #LexFridman #AndrewHuberman
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@Gaptangle@dragonscave.space 2026-08-25 20:22
@mxchara@cyberpunk.lol Probably not. A headmate of ours was getting tangled in another pile of terrible ideas at the same time as they tried to read this and got warned off it funnily enough by said pile of terrible ideas, so we might be a bit biased, but meh to that thing. We read some of it and he does ramble on. It's one thing if people ramble on in text, even if they're only occasionally using multiple characters to explain a concept. But he painted in all the rest of the hp cast as people to sit there openmouthed at how epic he is or resisting him in some way just to get informed of why that just doesn't make any sense after all. Now that we're not in so much danger reading it, we don't even want to, figure the rest of the book is basically the same as the first bit we read. *this was supposed to reply to the above post, we'll forgive you if you read it, ha can't speak for anyone else though