General HPMoR sneer collection

"If you think you can point to an unnecessary sentence within [HPMoR], go ahead and try." --Eliezer Yudkowsky, August 2022

This is just a trap to trick people into reading the first sentence of HPMoR isn't it?

This leads me to wonder: Has he said anything about Rowling, you know, turning out to be a garbage human?

I couldn't find anything, though I did find this thread where he ponders if the problem with police is that they just have too much gosh darn testosterone while awkwardly trying not to take a side:

People, I said "under 100 ng/dL of testosterone" with intent to thereby short-circuit trans issues because that is the part I care about. The conjecture (though I'd consider it halfway busted at this point) was meant to exclude, eg, a trans AFAB taking testosterone.

"A trans AFAB". Lovely.

Don't worry though, nothing quite says "transphobes not welcome" like this:

And to be explicit, we are happy to host economically literate people in favor of market solutions who politely accede to pronoun requests.

Well OK maybe they are welcome, but at least they'll begrudgingly use the right pronouns while they gleefully tear down all my human rights!

I hadn't read HPRick and Morty, so thanks for that!

Lots of gems about wizard fascism. I liked this part:

"It means, oh golly oh gee, that uh, one day science will discover space travel and cryogenics and then we'll all be, uh, immortal space gods with our own private stars, Professor!"

Harry hated how inarticulate he sometimes sounded outside of his own internal monologues, which were much more elaborate. One of these days he would have to sit down and write down his internal monologues in a coherent sequence.

I haven't seen STRANGE ÆONS' video about HPMOR here, so I'd strongly recommend checking that out

Back when I was a teenager and didn't know about LW or any of these turds, HPMoR came across my desk. I read less than five chapters before I realised I couldn't stand the smugness of MC Potter and dropped it. I took the most rational course of action after this and became a HPMoR hater. How could I prove, objectively, that this was a bad fic^[Note: This was just a framing device for this comment. I don't actually "hate" HPMoR. I mostly forgot about it until LW popped up in my life again like ten years later and I when into a K-hole and learned that the Bay Area, where I was soon to move for work, was filled with technofascists.]?

Initially, I was thinking about how it's kind of stupid to take a world with magic in it, then write a story about trying to impose "scientific" or "rational" concepts outside of that world onto it. It's kind of a non-starter in the sense that it feels like the point of a magical setting is to remove some of the annoyances of reality. I mean, that's the entire plot of HP to start with: Potter had a shit life, and now he gets to do dope wizard shit. Bringing in rationality to a magical world would seem to spoil the whole thing.

But then I realised that I don't read that much fiction and that there are probably enough counterexamples where I'm wrong, and that this idea is pulled off well. So I thought some more. How do you write a story that "rationally" talks about magic? I think it's an exercise in worldbuilding. Like, if you're going to write a story about a magical world and call out all the ways it doesn't fit with the economic and scientific models that apply to the mortal world, that kind of necessitates some reasoning about why.

For example, I remember that MC HP points out that you could perform arbitrage by exploiting the exchange rates between gold and silver in the mortal and magic worlds. OK, sure. The only thing that justified why the magical world hadn't closed this loophole was that the mortal and magic worlds were disconnected. My argument is: this is fine if the thing you're explaining is why mortals don't see fairies or dragons fly around every day. It's not fine if you're talking about arbitrage. You're saying that, in the magical world, nobody, at any point, has seen that you can buy something in one place for a lower price than you can sell elsewhere? Yud, of course, lampshades all this with Potter just saying "Boy, are these magical bumpkins stupid."

This is the only example I have to draw on from HPMoR because I ain't gonna read that shit to find more, but I guarantee that Yud never does the research about how all the models and laws and theories he likes to teach actually came about, and which ones would definitely be observable or applicable in the magic world and which wouldn't be.

(Image description: meme of a woman yelling in a man's ear. Captions read, "Their foundational text is a Harry Potter fanfic that supposedly teaches science. But it gets ninth-grade biology wrong by fucking up Punnett squares.")

Cognitive Biases due to a Narcissistic Parent, Illustrated by HPMOR Quotations

I should not be surprised that the author of HPRick and Morty also wrote SCP-8008.

General HPMoR

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When I found out he was already thirty (30) years old when he started writing it I had to physically get up and go for a walk

It was observed ages ago that Yud completely whiffed Mendelian genetics. Here's the explanation in the su3su2u1 review, to refresh:

The other model Hariezer lays out is that magic lies on a single recessive gene. He reasons squibs have one dominant, non-magical version, and one recessive magical version of the gene. So of kids born to squibs, 1/4 will be wizards. In this version, you either have magic or you don’t, so if wizards married the non-magical, wizards themselves could become more rare, but the power of wizards won’t be diluted. [...] Squibs are, by definition, the non-wizard children of wizard parents. Hariezer’s model 2 predicts that squibs cannot exist. It is already empirically disproven.

Hariezer, of course, does not notice this massive problem with his favored model, and Draco’s collected genealogy suggests about 6 out of 28 squib born children were wizards, so he declares model 2 wins the test.

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:

the genetically literate mind informed by canon will now inquire how two Wizard phenotypes ever yield a Squib phenotype when Wizards are Magical-Magical homozygous.

Ooh, do tell.

The answer is not fully given in HPMOR proper

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.

There is not a Magical gene complex that creates magic, but a Mundanity gene complex that suppresses it. After all, from pure physics we can never get to magic, but in an innately magical universe somebody could cast a spell to create the local appearance of mostly physics.

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.

Similarly if all beings start out mundane then no gene complex can possibly create magic in them, but if all beings start out magical some gene complex could suppress their magic. Squibs and ultimately Muggleborns then arise naturally from a population of Muggle phenotypes as mutations damage the Mundanity gene complex, and in turn Wizard phenotypes sometimes yield Squibs as the Mundanity gene complex sometimes repairs itself by chromosomal crossover, with the phenomenon being more commonly observed in wizarding families with recent Muggle ancestry, to the alarm of genetics-illiterate purebloods.

From the Mendelian pattern implying the Mundanity gene complex is all on one chromosome, the gene complex can be inferred to be artificial in nature.

For Yudkowsky, operons must be evidence of Intelligent Design.

What's the best way for Effective Altruists to allocate grant money? Purchasing malaria nets? Direct giving? No, of course not. It's buying $28k worth of copies of HPMOR (archive)

And here's a relevant Reddit thread about how HPMoR was even worse when first posted.

And when Bluesky rediscovered HPMoR, we got this from a certain Paulrus of West Bumblefrick:

I’m sorry to say this, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that if you’re over the age of 17 and into Harry Potter, you’re either evil or susceptible to being manipulated by evil people.