posted on March 10, 2019 04:26 AM by
u/IsThisSatireOrNot
22
u/IsThisSatireOrNot22 pointsat 1552192015.000000
Since I’d have to be a real monster to make anyone read through a
fanfic of HPMOR, here are the top points that make me see think “the
author seems to fundamentally disagree with several aspects of the
rationalist ideology; how much of this fanfic is genuine?”
Or, perhaps, “maybe the author didn’t realize that HJPEV was a
self-insert of Elizer Yudkowsky.”
Harry tries to petrify everyone in the world and upload their minds
into a basilisk supercomputer. He sees this as saving the world.
Ginny, the protagonist, is a trans woman. This is presented pretty
much positively.
God is real, and the wizards trapped him. But don’t worry, he’s God,
so he’s forgiving.
Harry calls Ginny a “Deathist”, but Ginny is right because God is
real and heaven exists.
Harry excludes Ginny from the bay area rationalist’s
club“Bayesian Conspiracy” because she expresses religious beliefs.
He’s the bad guy for this.
Ginny manages to produce a Patronus 2.0 through religious
conviction, not through Harry’s belief that death will be conquered on
earth.
A passage in which Ginny attacks the Zimbardo prison experiment and
the very premises of Harry’s ideology, which is given a fair bit of time
in the original HPMOR.
Harry goes full on dark lord at the end, stealing magical artifacts,
such as the “Slate Star Codex” and the “Time Cube”. Draco Malfoy is a
“magical realist”–I assume not in the literary sense, but in the “race
realist” sense. Harry runs something called “Magileaks” which he used to
dox Ginny.
> I'd have to be a real monster to make anyone read through a fanfic of HPMOR,
My hot take is that fanfics of HPMOR are generally more fun to read than HPMOR itself.
> Ginny, the protagonist, is a trans woman. This is presented pretty much positively.
I completely missed that. **edit:** ah no, I remember now that Ginny started as a boy, excuse me
Also, the presentation of LessWrong meetups in ch 8 (I think) is pretty accurate.
The author actually posted a bunch about it in the SpaceBattles
“Let’s Read” thread (really more “Let’s Skewer Mercilessly”) for
HPMOR; they talked a lot about how the fic was in essence a means to
reconcile their religious beliefs with their rationalist ones – and how,
like adjoining two magnets with the same polarity, trying to do so
eventually caused the author to depreciate both beliefs.
p.s. if you haven’t read said thread, please do, it’s a
play-by-post MST3k and a great sneertrove.
> Deputy Headmistress Minerva McGonagall was watching Harry with a bemused expression. She looked quite witchy in her black robes and pointed hat, but when she spoke she sounded formal and Scottish, which didn't go together with the look at all.
> Strange considering that three of the most famous witches ever were Scottish. Although Macbeth is hardly even soft sci fi so I guess he hasn't seen that.
Hecking heck of a sneer, that.
Also, I don't particularly feel like reading through the whole thread. I got through the pedantic argument about the use of the word Omake and the extensive discussion of Quantum Physics (that as far as I could tell was fairly actual-intellectual, not pseudo-intellectual, but there are better ways to learn quantum mechanics than forum posts), so is there any chance you could give a ballpark page number for where the author posted?
A highlight from one of the reviews on fanfiction.net:
How can anyone like this ending? Do you have no personal philosophies
of your own? How can you think Ginny did the right thing, or disagree
with the basalisk? I don’t want to live on this planet any more.
Oh, boy, someone put out the LiteralHeadCannon signal!
So, first, thanks for linking the fic, even here. Four years down the
line, I’m not especially proud of it (it was middling-quality work from
me even at the time I wrote it), and I think I might even regret writing
it, but I am some kind of narcissist who constantly
vanity-searches myself, and I usually get a fuzzy feeling whenever I see
people still talking about it, even if they’re just complaining about
how much it sucks. In the last proper chapter thread, I
posted a bit about my background and my intention in writing the
fic, and it was sincerely meant. A lot of the fic was some light
ribbing and reflection on the rationalist community, and when they
didn’t take it as well as I’d expected, that was something of a lesson
for me.
Second, /u/maroon_sweater is correct that I’m an “avid CWTer” and
that I’ve been featured here for that reason (or, more specifically,
because I’m way, way off to the right-wing, screaming incoherently in
Alex Jones Land). I do not think she’s correct that the culture war
thread radicalized me, as I discussed last
time I popped in here. If I really have been radicalized by an
internet community (and I’m not even sure if that’s true, because I’ve
pretty much always been a hardline ideological Republican), I’d probably
say it’s /pol/ - a friend pulled me into it during the 2016 election,
and although I haven’t posted there much in a long time (they really
went off the deep-end with the antisemitism at some point and it really
put me off), I do still regularly check up on it, and I also subscribe
to a lot of conspiracy theories I first encountered there. The role SSC
played was mostly just lulling me into posting at length about politics
on Reddit.
Third, I just checked via the search function, /u/chimaeraUndying,
and the first page I posted on about GWSI in the SpaceBattles HPMOR
thread was 199. It’s actually profoundly embarrassing - I initially
posted there under an alt trying to get people to read about the fic,
and later I decided to actually join as myself, and a mod noticed we
were the same person, contacted me privately, and merged the two
accounts. It really was
shameful-to-the-point-of-being-kind-of-funny-at-my-expense, so I figure
the sneerers here will eat that up. Don’t do alts, people.
I might see y’all around. I still think I have a lot more in common
ideologically with the Less Wrong crowd than with this subreddit, but I
have somehow gone from hating everything you people stand for to feeling
kind of warm towards you, maybe? It’s kind of hard to explain. I’m
reconsidering some things. (Feel free to tell me to fuck off because I’m
being pretty slimy right now.)
>In the six years we've known each other
Wait a minute, *what*? Are you sure you're not confusing me for someone else? It's *possible* that you've been reading my posts for a little over four years, given that you were likely in the HPMOR fandom when I was most active there, but we haven't had any significant social interaction outside the Parahumans fandom, and even then only in the past six months going off of our Discord chat history. The narrative I have of our knowing each other is something like:
You, maroon_sweater or Roon, another big name Worm fan (probably a much bigger name than me, given that you moderate locally prestigious communities like Cauldron and WormMemes) approached me to chat and vent, we chatted and vented about stuff a few times, then I noticed you were aggressively politically terrible in a way I wasn't willing to deal with, I blocked you, and shortly thereafter I left Cauldron because I was afraid of you. In turn, you realized what had happened, went digging through my Reddit history, discovered that *I* was aggressively politically terrible in a way *you* weren't willing to deal with, and I think just started generally hatestalking me? I mean, I think of myself as a deeply paranoid and suspicious person, but I'm still pretty confident in my suspicion that you have masses of alts you've mobbed me with a few times. Sometimes I even did something stupid and deserved to be mobbed, but even when I realized that and tried to make myself better, all of the hints suggesting that it was just you acting under a bunch of false identities made me feel crazier and crazier, more and more hunted. Gaslit in the classic "personal psychological abuse" sense. When you started posting on SneerClub, that fit with my theory that you were following me, but I tried to reassure myself that it could be a coincidence. You've confirmed now that you followed me here, though (and it sounded like you were making [an enemies list or something](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/ax926x/that_guy_must_be_real_fun_at_dates/ehuelrw/), which is terrifying). I really hope I was wrong about the alts, and I'm sorry for making that accusation if I was. If I wasn't, though, then, like... please stop?
>No. You introduced me to this community, however unintentionally, and I appreciate that and you in general.
I'm not sure how much irony you intended this to be read with, but if you really meant it to be nice, then thank you. I think you helped me to understand some major unhealthy trends in the Parahumans fandom (particularly surrounding misogyny and Ward) that I probably wouldn't have figured out from inside my own head, so I'm grateful for your perspective regardless of the many important things we disagree on.
>I should have made an alt for "sneers," and the fact I couldn't be assed tondo that should confirm that NO I AM NOT STALKING YOU WITH ALTS YOU DING DONG.
I could believe this, but I'm still inclined to say that *someone in your orbit* is stalking me with alts. I think you indicate later in the post that you've privately discussed me, so maybe one of the people you've privately discussed me with? ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ Most "smoking gun" example, although certainly not the only example: what the fuck is [wormwank](https://www.reddit.com/r/wormwank/)? This is a case that isn't really even seriously trying to hide that it's a bunch of alts. Maybe even deliberately leaving the trail to make me feel crazier.
I can think of two different people besides you who could very plausibly be responsible (it could also be both of them, or maybe someone else). One of those possibilities would *really* suck, to the point that I basically panicked when I thought of it while writing this post.
>Contonuing off of the illusion of transparency: if I come off as hateful or evil to you, you come off as...well, the fact you're the age when schizophrenia tends to manifest was brought up in the wake of your meltdown.
This is... honestly so on-the-nose that it feels like it should have made me jump backwards into the wall. I actually considered the possibility that you're *trying to convince me* I have schizophrenia, or maybe *will me into* having schizophrenia, and this is just you tipping your hand, but I couldn't make it make sense and it was just kind of embarrassing that I tried. I have an uncle (on my mother's side) who really went off the rails, and has displayed behavior that's obviously on the schizophrenia spectrum for a large portion of his life, bouncing from cult to cult. A new-age movement, a militia movement, something with Bible codes, something with doomsday prepping. I always admired him for his passion while simultaneously seeing him as a cautionary tale. My father isn't nearly as bad, but he's displayed some relevant troubling behavior patterns himself (which have always been of much greater concern to me than those of my uncle since my father has a much greater impact on my life). I think I've mostly kept the fear that I'll turn into a mess like my uncle or my father-at-his-worst suppressed, but I do consciously think about it fairly often, and now I'm thinking it's probably a very heavy theme in my subconscious.
Note: I've started having minor visual hallucinations recently. Bugs and flying things zipping past my field of vision, and then I go to investigate and often become pretty sure they were never actually there. I think it's worst in the middle of the night when I'm sitting in the light of my computer, like right now, for instance. I think this symptom and a fair few other symptoms would be massively improved if I got myself on a healthy sleep schedule, and I've thought that for a long time, and now I'm wondering if my inability to get myself on a healthy sleep schedule is *itself* a symptom of something. (This is also slightly complicated by the fact that I've often wondered in the past year if I have *hypochondria* because I keep noticing myself having worrying symptoms and I worry about it, but the hypochondria explanation may just be a defense mechanism I use to stop worrying.)
Meanwhile, over in the Worm fandom, as Ward's progressed and I've tried to predict what's going to happen, I've been increasingly troubled by my apparent ability to find loads of convincing evidence for *all kinds* of ideas I get stuck on, only for most of them to turn out to be very definitively false. This overactive pattern-matching is pretty much the bare skeleton of schizophrenia, and I think I've flinched away from connecting that thought together, just feeling a vague dread or worry instead.
One major problem in the narrative you're drawing is that you seem to think I "broke" in 2016-2017, around when I turned 20. I definitely got into a lot of weird shit around then, which has shaped me since, but I think the worst part of my life mentally by far was the latter half of high school, from 2013-2014 (I'd already sort of gotten better by the time I graduated in 2015). I won't go into extensive detail, but in short, I spent a couple of years 100% convinced that God had designated me the most important person in the modern era, destined to take over the world, etc. School eventually suspended me and sent me to a psychologist for something directly related, and I proceeded to lie my ass off about nearly every belief I had that I thought would sound crazy, in order to get through the process and get back to school as fast as possible. It totally worked, but lying about not believing in the whole complex of crazy ideas somehow pushed me to accidentally *actually* stop believing in them. By the way, the Ginny's-the-prophesied-savior-of-the-church-or-whatever subplot in GWSI is a self-deprecating private joke about this episode in my life that no-one except me got until I posted this just now, so yeah.
The weirdest part of your sending this message just now, though, is, well... for a few months now, I've been doing prewriting on a fic, and it's a *really* ambitious project, so I wasn't sure how likely it was to actually happen given my poor track record. Then, a few days ago, I decided "fuck it, life's short, I want this" and began actually writing it, which is how I wound up getting more writing done in the last few days than in the last few years before that (no it's in a document you can't see it yet or anytime soon if you even want to). The thing is, a *major intended purpose* of the fic is to draw off of my poor mental health history (and sublimated anxiety over my poor future mental health prospects, yikes) and thematically explore it. Schizophrenia is a central theme. Flipping over from writing the fic to reading this message from you basically hit me with a mental truckload of "friendly reminder that all this upsetting disordered thinking stuff you're putting in the story is directly taken from you and that's why you're writing it", which in retrospect I actually kind of needed because large parts of me had actually stupidly *forgotten that's what I was doing*, and I was thinking things like "wait a minute, isn't it kind of insensitive for you to be writing this fic, given that you're mentally healthy", which, um, thinking more clearly about it now, *no*.
Wishing you well! :)
> I purged comments and deleted accounts once I hit 1000 karma or every two months, whichever came first
That's awful. I don't know if that's standard behavior for shitpost-ish communities, maybe it's considered normal there, but from where I stand, that's pretty bad. Accountability and archiving are important.
the sort to inspire terrified paranoia in chuds by existing
this may be generalisable to an explanation of where SSC culture warriors come from
IT'S ALL MAROON_SWEATER'S FAULT
Since I’d have to be a real monster to make anyone read through a fanfic of HPMOR, here are the top points that make me see think “the author seems to fundamentally disagree with several aspects of the rationalist ideology; how much of this fanfic is genuine?”
Or, perhaps, “maybe the author didn’t realize that HJPEV was a self-insert of Elizer Yudkowsky.”
bay area rationalist’s club“Bayesian Conspiracy” because she expresses religious beliefs. He’s the bad guy for this.Ah, yes, this one.
The author actually posted a bunch about it in the SpaceBattles “Let’s Read” thread (really more “Let’s Skewer Mercilessly”) for HPMOR; they talked a lot about how the fic was in essence a means to reconcile their religious beliefs with their rationalist ones – and how, like adjoining two magnets with the same polarity, trying to do so eventually caused the author to depreciate both beliefs.
p.s. if you haven’t read said thread, please do, it’s a play-by-post MST3k and a great sneertrove.
[deleted]
On the topic of HPMOR fanfics, Significant Digits seemed pretty good, or at least not toxic.
A highlight from one of the reviews on fanfiction.net:
Oh, boy, someone put out the LiteralHeadCannon signal!
So, first, thanks for linking the fic, even here. Four years down the line, I’m not especially proud of it (it was middling-quality work from me even at the time I wrote it), and I think I might even regret writing it, but I am some kind of narcissist who constantly vanity-searches myself, and I usually get a fuzzy feeling whenever I see people still talking about it, even if they’re just complaining about how much it sucks. In the last proper chapter thread, I posted a bit about my background and my intention in writing the fic, and it was sincerely meant. A lot of the fic was some light ribbing and reflection on the rationalist community, and when they didn’t take it as well as I’d expected, that was something of a lesson for me.
Second, /u/maroon_sweater is correct that I’m an “avid CWTer” and that I’ve been featured here for that reason (or, more specifically, because I’m way, way off to the right-wing, screaming incoherently in Alex Jones Land). I do not think she’s correct that the culture war thread radicalized me, as I discussed last time I popped in here. If I really have been radicalized by an internet community (and I’m not even sure if that’s true, because I’ve pretty much always been a hardline ideological Republican), I’d probably say it’s /pol/ - a friend pulled me into it during the 2016 election, and although I haven’t posted there much in a long time (they really went off the deep-end with the antisemitism at some point and it really put me off), I do still regularly check up on it, and I also subscribe to a lot of conspiracy theories I first encountered there. The role SSC played was mostly just lulling me into posting at length about politics on Reddit.
Third, I just checked via the search function, /u/chimaeraUndying, and the first page I posted on about GWSI in the SpaceBattles HPMOR thread was 199. It’s actually profoundly embarrassing - I initially posted there under an alt trying to get people to read about the fic, and later I decided to actually join as myself, and a mod noticed we were the same person, contacted me privately, and merged the two accounts. It really was shameful-to-the-point-of-being-kind-of-funny-at-my-expense, so I figure the sneerers here will eat that up. Don’t do alts, people.
I might see y’all around. I still think I have a lot more in common ideologically with the Less Wrong crowd than with this subreddit, but I have somehow gone from hating everything you people stand for to feeling kind of warm towards you, maybe? It’s kind of hard to explain. I’m reconsidering some things. (Feel free to tell me to fuck off because I’m being pretty slimy right now.)