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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

  • Jun 16, 2021
  • Eliezer Yudkowsky
  • 853 responses.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a work of alternate universe Harry Potter fan fiction wherein Petunia Evans has married an Oxford biochemistry professor and young genius Harry grows up

  • Title: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
  • Author: Eliezer Yudkowsky
  • ISBN: -
  • Page: 205
  • Format: ebook

    • Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a work of alternate universe Harry Potter fan fiction wherein Petunia Evans has married an Oxford biochemistry professor and young genius Harry grows up fascinated by science and science fiction When he finds out that he is a wizard, he tries to apply scientific principles to his study of magic, with sometimes surprising resuHarry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a work of alternate universe Harry Potter fan fiction wherein Petunia Evans has married an Oxford biochemistry professor and young genius Harry grows up fascinated by science and science fiction When he finds out that he is a wizard, he tries to apply scientific principles to his study of magic, with sometimes surprising results.

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      205 Eliezer Yudkowsky
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      Posted by:Eliezer Yudkowsky
      Published :2021-03-05T13:09:17+00:00

    About "Eliezer Yudkowsky"

    1. Eliezer Yudkowsky

      From Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky is an American artificial intelligence researcher concerned with the singularity and an advocate of friendly artificial intelligence, living in Redwood City, California.Yudkowsky did not attend high school and is an autodidact with no formal education in artificial intelligence He co founded the nonprofit Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence SIAI in 2000 and continues to be employed as a full time Research Fellow there.Yudkowsky s research focuses on Artificial Intelligence theory for self understanding, self modification, and recursive self improvement seed AI and also on artificial intelligence architectures and decision theories for stably benevolent motivational structures Friendly AI, and Coherent Extrapolated Volition in particular Apart from his research work, Yudkowsky has written explanations of various philosophical topics in non academic language, particularly on rationality, such as An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes Theorem.Yudkowsky was, along with Robin Hanson, one of the principal contributors to the blog Overcoming Bias sponsored by the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University In early 2009, he helped to found Less Wrong, a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality The Sequences on Less Wrong, comprising over two years of blog posts on epistemology, Artificial Intelligence, and metaethics, form the single largest bulk of Yudkowsky s writing.

    853 Comments

    1. Imagine Harry Potter being replaced with a Harry Potter with combined talents of Ender Wiggins, Artemis Fowl and Yagami Light and put him in world much darker than Rowling envisioned. Yep, that's what this book was. No Ron or Hagrid to distract you, this is a Machiavellian Harry who manipulates people to his own ends, with powers the Dark Lord knows not, and the ambition for world domination (or, as he would call it, world optimization)It is a HUGE book and still ongoing. Took me three days stra [...]

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    2. AI researcher and decision theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky probably woke up one day and asked himself a single question: what would have happened in Harry Potter’s first year in Hogwarts, had he not been such an insufferable idiot? You might not have considered him to be an idiot in the first place, but as the book progresses and the new Harry makes his way around Hogwarts, facing the same problems and situations, it becomes impossible to ignore the oh so logical and natural way he handles them thi [...]

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    3. I wanted to like this, honestly. When I stumbled upon it and read that description, I figured it was going to be brilliant. So naturally it wasn't. The author leaves a note saying if you don't like it by chapter five, wait until chapter ten, and if you still don't like it by then, get out. That's exactly what I'm doing.This isn't the first book (so to speak) where the idea is wonderful but it's executed horribly. For starters, the writing is a bit sloppy at times, and when I say at times, I mean [...]

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    4. Recently I've been wondering just what exactly I wanted from literary fiction. Surely I did not expect life-changing epiphanies, at least not from every single book. But neither did I want my books be merely means to cheap escapism, which I had, perhaps mistakenly, long associated with genre fiction. Somehow I seem to be asking both too much and not enough, and therein lies the reason for my inability to rekindle the kind of pure unadulterated love I used to have for reading. No longer can I sim [...]

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    5. Great idea; terrible execution. In fact, I think the summary is completely misleading. While some scenes had me laughing out loud, I spent most of my time cringing or raising one eyebrow or the other; HPMOR is saturated with Yudkowsky's blatant disdain and a condescending tone. Characters are, for the most part, wildly out of character. Harry completely fails to act like an 11 year old boy, and reads like a thinly-veiled, sociopathic self-insert. Draco is also worrying sociopathic, even beyond t [...]

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    6. I wanted to love this book, I really did. I mean, the premise itself was what got me hooked. I'm sure we've all thought that there was something to be desired in the Plausibility and Possibilities department of the original Harry Potter series, so I jumped at the idea of a realistic story inspired by the methods of rationality! Turns out it wasn't inspired by it so much as it was drowned by it. Spoiler Alert: I didn't finish the book. Yudkowsky left a note about how the series hits its stride at [...]

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    7. Update: 15 March, 2015OMG! It's over. It has been a wild ride, one of the best I've ever been on. The ending was satisfying in ways I cannot express. Yudkowsky has wowed, amazed, and blown minds through this epic, and I can't wait to read more of his work in the future!--I have never felt the need to take fan fiction seriously. They are, at best, exercises of creativity in a predetermined world, and the best of them usually do not stray too far from the established lore. As it stands, “Harry P [...]

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    8. This is the funniest thing I have ever read. I have never read something this funny before. It was extremely difficult to do anything except read it until I had "finished" it, and now it's hard to do anything but think about it and wish there was a lot more of it for me to read.I guess I'll just read some of his rationalist essay series instead!

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    9. I can't decide if this was really good or really bad. As a novel (or the majority of a novel) it was pretty terrible. As fanfic it seemed pretty good (to me, which doesn't mean anything, because I am not the kind of guy that reads fanfic at all). I guess I'll go with three stars which seems to say both of those things at once.Concept that I like: take 11-year-old Harry Potter, about to enter Hogwarts. Make him an incredibly astute and science-minded young boy, and then see just how he'd react to [...]

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    10. Imagine if Ender Wiggen were put in Harry Potter's place, and the cunning of other characters upgraded in a similar way. Yudkowsky is a gifted writer, and he plays off the tropes of fanfiction and the idiosyncrasies of the world of Hogwarts in a way that transcends the genre. The books is at times laugh out loud funny, touching, inspiring, and always very smart. Writing fanfiction in order to get more people to read your blog about obscure logical fallacies!? You'd have to be a genius to actuall [...]

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    11. I wanted to like this fanfic. As a mathematician and an atheist I should have liked this fanfic.I didn't. The writing is poor (even for fanfic) and the characterisation worse. The author has turned Harry Potter into the most unsympathetic and unlikeable child I can possibly imagine - which I would guess from his bio is also a blatant Mary-Sue.Should have been called Harry Potter, the Snotty Little Git.

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    12. HPMOR (as it's known to fans) is the perfect book for nerds: funny, clever, rife with allusions to other great nerdly works, and yet seriously capable of teaching something real. In this case, the real value-add are principles of reasoning that can lead to better decisions by genuinely emotional, non-Spockian humans in real life. Shockingly, this story also has a plot. It runs roughly parallel with the HP canon, but the relationships are different and the entire arc of the Potter stories seems d [...]

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    13. Eliezer has completely turned the story around with a fabulous mixture of real science and JKRverse. The book is peppered with real life use of rationality , Bayesian Logic and psychology. It’s quite a learning experience, especially if you look up the bits you don’t understand.

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    14. This is an enormous fan fic version of the first book in the Harry Potter series, rewritten portraying Harry as a hyperrationalist.Not worth five stars as a work of fiction per se, but fascinating enough to get bumped up to amazing because of several other factors: • Folks with mildly compulsive rationalist and/or scientific leanings often have trouble with the nonsensical goings on of magical worlds. Occasionally Yudkowsky nails this so well that I was laughing convulsively. That the author [...]

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    15. Alright, my first complaint is that it should warn readers that it contains sensitive issues. I almost choked on the chocolate I've been eating when I read Draco's nonchalant threat of rape. I mean, hello? Isn't he still eleven? And okay, maybe there are lots of open-minded eleven-year-olds in the world but saying that to an almost complete stranger is too much! Harry was very close to being bad here; it made me wonder what that idiot Petunia had been teaching him. He is rude to his elders, whic [...]

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    16. Harry Potter + science + philosophy = slightly mind boggling + very entertainingAll of the above is true. However, whether or not I have truly read this fan fiction is a different question. In one sense, I have read it. In another, I have not. The reason for my discontinuity can easily be explained. I have read all of this work that exists up to this point in time. However, this book is far from complete. In any case, though, I will accept that I have "read" this book because I can't be "current [...]

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    17. Okay, so this gets tricky.The first, say, ten-fifteen chapters were AMAZING. I was cracking up (I snorted my soda at pretty much the same times Harry hacked up his Comed-Tea) at the many absolutely hysterical moments that come up when Harry is a complete brilliant jerk with negligible people skills (he has them in theory- probably because he read about them- and he can manipulate, but otherwise). Then, by about chapter 15 (maybe not til chapter 20) I just started getting bored. The writing was g [...]

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    18. Update: I'm forced to rate this down after reading danluu/su3su2u1/hpmor/ (I do hope he doesn't mind my sharing the link), as it turns out that Yudkowsky was actually rather sloppy with his science, many of his claims are unsupported by research and/or incorrectly applied to the situation. Which is a total deal breaker.Quite fun, but lots of wishful thinking by the author.I never thought I'd say this, but Rowling is way more realistic! True, she made lots of irrational mistakes, some of which ar [...]

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    19. Simply Brilliant. Arguably one of the best books I have read so far. Definitely better than the original Harry Potter itself. It's not meant to be a spoof, but an espousal of the author's philosophy of rationality. This book is so realistic, even though it's based on magic. It makes you reflect on life. Above all, it keeps you guessing till the very end because the author refuses to categorize characters in the book as being good or evil. And the best part is, the book is free to download from h [...]

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    20. Although I think it's rather well-written for a fanfic (not quite good enough for a novel), Harry was too Mary Sue-ish. The main example of this is when 11 year old Harry creates a human Patronus that literally kills Dementors. There is also a bit too much Dumbledore and Ron bashing for my tastes, plus Harry is extremely condescending.

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    21. At the time of this review the story is 103 chapters, and counting, long (longer than the actual books), and still within the timeframe of the first book. Set to end March 2015.An alternate world where the role of Harry Potter is played by a somewhat sociopathic Sheldon Cooper. Instead of marrying the repugnant mr. Dursley, Harry's aunt Petunia married a respected physicist resulting in Harry being raised in a loving environment where knowledge is praised and making the most of your life an acce [...]

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    22. A fun take on the Potterverse from someone obsessed with all the ways that humans fail to behave in ways that make sense - for a rather strict meaning of "make sense". Leaving aside the usual fights over the legitimacy of fanfic in general, the big question is how much Yudkowsky's Potter is an idealized author stand-in (a "Mary Sue", or "Marty Stu" in the parlance). My answer: Quite a lot, but not fatally. On the minus side, this Harry Potter talks and thinks quite a lot like someone in his late [...]

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    23. Not only is this the best fanfiction I've ever read, it is among my favorite novels of all time, and so far I've only been able to read up to chapter 85.This is a reimagining of the canonical novels of Harry Potter where the main character is extremely rational. Although he is a preteen, this version of Harry Potter has a mind on par with an extremely gifted 18 year old, and it shows. His nemesis, Voldemort, is similarly increased in intelligence by a dramatic amount. The Tom Riddle of this fanf [...]

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    24. I will keep this review brief and to the point. First off, all the negative reviews come from people who are either too stupid to understand it or are too in love with the Potterverse to accept something better. Keep that in mind. Written with a magical version of Ender Wiggin, Harry Potter is a child genius who is skilled in the ways of science and (Yudkowsky's brand of) rationality. Naturally, Eliezer toys with all the loopholes of Rowling's original works, and adds far more depth to the chara [...]

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    25. Я сделала это! 2007 вордовских или 25700 эпабовских страниц. Я уже не помню когда такие марафоны в последний раз делала. Произведение стоит читать, и стоит не боятся его отнюдь не маленьких размеров. Оно сможет вас удивить. Запутать, насмешить, но да, в конечном итоге очень удивли [...]

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    26. Finally finished this. I think I'll have to do another read somewhere down the line to see if I actually learned anything out of this.Cognitive psychology is not my thing, but this is the closest HP fan-fic that attempts magical realism, and I admire it for that. There are certain background story changes that I consider to be canon in the back of my head. Things like the secret of Philosopher's stone, Salazar Slytherin having taught Battle Magic, the True Patronus charm, the safety rules of Tra [...]

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    27. This book is flawed in many ways. It's too long. The protagonist is (in periods) being too annoying. It strains suspension of disbelief pretty regularly, and it's a pity that boys/men hold the 3 most important positions. Despite these flaws, there's no way I can give this book less than 5 stars. There's just too much that is hilariously good fun, and it's just too skillfull in spearing many of the more silly aspects of the original HP-series, yet it does so good-naturedly and with respect and ki [...]

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    28. If you are a geek, you will most likely enjoy this book far more than the actual Harry Potter series. This is especially true if you're a fan of smart characters who don't make stupid decisions that leave you screaming at the author (I always get this unbelieving look in my eyes when, in the first movie, Harry keeps leaving his invisibility cloak on the ground in random places.)Also, this is the book that sparked my interest in science and rationality. So there's that, too.I've always considered [...]

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    29. I read this simultaneously with Bruce Sterling's Distraction, and they’re a bit intertwined for me. They both feature male protagonists who are special by birth—Oscar Valparaiso is a clone with extrahuman abilities, Harry Potter is The Boy Who Lived And Was Then Raised To Be Rational. They both involve a lot of political maneuvering, interpersonal manipulation, and being terribly clever. They’re both quite funny.This is a web serial, reimagining JK Rowling with a single point of divergence [...]

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