Since Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is apparently still a thing, I figured I’d spend a few minutes before fediverse monster-movie night to collect relevant links:
- Archive of su3su2u1 review
- Spacebattles.com forum thread: The Wizard of Woah and Irrational Methods of Irrationality
- HPRick and Morty
- “If you think you can point to an unnecessary sentence within [HPMoR], go ahead and try.”
- Sneering at Yudkowsky’s advice about writing “awesome” characters
- Sneering at Yudkowsky’s retrospective interview (August 2025)
And a question dug up from one of those old threads: OK, so, Yud poured a lot of himself into writing HPMoR. It took time, he obviously believed he was doing something important — and he was writing autobiography, in big ways and small. This leads me to wonder: Has he said anything about Rowling, you know, turning out to be a garbage human?


It was observed ages ago that Yud completely whiffed Mendelian genetics. Here’s the explanation in the su3su2u1 review, to refresh:
Which goes to show that you shouldn’t try to learn science from HPMOR: the facts are bad, and the reasoning is bad. It doesn’t matter pedagogically whether it’s the author’s mistake or the character’s. And, really, having an 11-year-old boy who has done nothing but read books be the conduit for explanations of science is just a bad structural choice, for the same reason that you don’t see textbooks with unreliable narrators.
Yud is still throwing words at this:
Ooh, do tell.
Ooh, do fuck off. You don’t get points for the story you didn’t write. And adding lore after the fact doesn’t change that your characters made the wrong decision from the information they had available at the time.
This is weird and arbitrary. Plenty of science-fiction stories have magic (or that which is effectively magic) operating by unknown-to-us physics. For example, the Laundry Files books are full of sigils and geases and summonings, and they explicitly say that the physicists are right, in the domain they’ve studied.
For Yudkowsky, operons must be evidence of Intelligent Design.
midichlorian lore is better than this dreck. rare midichlorian W
The same chapter has another instance of trademark bad Yud writing: “gom jabbar” is a torture spell that Draco applies to Hariezer’s hand. Few things kill tension faster and yeet the reader out of the story with greater force than a superfluous Nerd Culture™ reference. And the very next chapter has the smegheaded Death Note bit. It’s Ready Player One for cult inductees.
References that I thought this was before I looked it up: star wars EU (gom jabba-r), or one piece (gomu gomu jabbar). It was neither and just dune.
I can picture Yud smirking to himself, thinking of how clever he is for shoving a sci-fi reference into a fantasy universe, in doing so injecting just a little more rationality into an otherwise irrational genre.
Anyway here’s the rejected RP1 theme song