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’s definitely a world building exercise, and I think you’re really close to the ways that Yud does it badly. Like, the TERF unrelated to the now-passed fabric store is not particularly interested in world building outside of giving the story the appropriate vibe. Her world is absolutely littered with inconsistencies and things that don’t really hold together even before you start bringing in the Yuddite ideology and associated models. What a good and interesting writer would do is use that as the jumping-off point. Why don’t wizards arbitrage their gold and silver coins? There could be a dozen interesting answers to that question that could be fun to explore or create neat complications for a story. But rather than actually engage with either the setting he’s reading or the science he’s writing into it, Yud just name-drops it to show how smart he and his friends are compared to this setting.