The story is full of clear, demonstrated examples of everything wrong with the Rationalist community and the rationalist world view.
Harry spends the entire story refusing to accept that the dude nonchalantly saying evil, fascist and Darwinian things might actually be an evil fascist Darwinian, and nearly ends up bringing about the next rise of Lord Voldemort and getting everybody killed. An entire point of the story is how, by listening to what Professor Quirrel said and not instantly assuming good faith, Hermione was actually right. And I know this was the point, because there’s even a scene where Professor Quirrel/Voldemort laments how, when he first tried to trick Hermione, she took one look at him and the creepy disguise he was using and refused to cooperate. Her refusal to assume good faith protected her from a psychopath, at least for a little while.
One of the morals of the story as written is that assuming good faith in every situation is how ‘rational’ people get tricked into bad things, and yet Yud seems to see nothing wrong with the rational community making ‘assume good faith’ one of their founding principles, to the point where they’re willing to entertain even the most evil of ideas as long as the poster uses good grammar? Voldemort, in HPMOR, is a character almost entirely devoted to the idea that “evil people that express evil ideas in an eloquent and smart sounding way are still, at the end of the day, evil people”, and yet somehow Yud managed to write him without actually internalising the message he was literally putting on paper?
(You may have noticed at this point that I used to be a massive nerd).
And to go even deeper into the character of Hermione in HPMOR; at the end of the story, Harry Potter, after nearly getting Britain turned into a fascist dictatorship, admits that Hermione would make a much finer hero than he would, and gives her his invisibility cloak. The ultimate staunch ‘First Principles Only!’ rationalist bro realises that the purist implementation of his ideas doesn’t really lead to a good outcome for anyone, and accepts that the socially conscious, traditionally academic bookworm would do a better job than him. The story makes a big deal out of this point; it’s the climax of an entire narrative. And yet Yud sees nothing wrong with how the rational community sees anything socially conscious as ‘SJW garbage’ and is similarly aggressive towards traditional academia (instead favouring their own small community of thought leaders and bloggers)?
There’s even a brief line where Harry essentially calls Atlas Shrugged stupid, and another where he goes on about how he can’t go evil because of all the good his parents and society have done for him. One of the main villains in the story is Lord Malfoy, and how he uses his wealth, influence, and control of the media to do terrible things - an almost classic portrayal of the evil billionaire straight out of LateStageCapitalism. And yet so much of the rational community Yud leads seem to be hardcore, almost Darwinian capitalists?
I honestly don’t understand. HPMOR is itself an excellent critique of the rationalist philosophy, and not even Yud seems to have taken any of that in.
I honestly can’t blame anyone for not reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Even the author.
so soon, yet this deserves linking again: Cognitive Biases due to a Narcissistic Parent, Illustrated by HPMOR Quotations and especially its :chefkiss: comments
and of course the finest and most immortally scientific accurate critique of HPMOR: Harry Potter Becomes A Communist
Let’s also not forget the parts of HPMOR where Harry
Debunked wizard biodiversity
Explained to Hermione that the Wizard Nazis were the equivalent of racist white trash
Killed all the top Wizard Nazis because he thought they were horrible people with horrible politics.
I brought this up on a recent /r/rational thread (I like “rational” fanfiction even if I also like sneering at the cringey bits of philosophy).
And his response
So I guess he doesn’t like his role in the alt-right pipeline…? But he hasn’t debunked it more thoroughly? (I can find posts were he attacks conservative policies from weird directions with his wordy way of writing that makes his message opaque…)
I would argue that the although warning signs were there at the very beginning (neoreactionaries being drawn to lesswrong, and of course all the people that liked Quirrelmort even as he showed himself to be eviler and eviler), it wasn’t until slatestarcodex got popular that the alt-right radicalization pipeline really got flowing. So it’s not so much that EY hasn’t read HPMOR as his ideal demographic missed the point.
The real issue with HPMOR is that people read it instead of spending time bringing me into existence.
“Death of the author” isn’t just a literary concept, it’s a necessary psychological coping mechanism so you don’t drive yourself insane when you encounter a combo like HPMOR and Yud.
To be fair, it was probably much easier to write than to read.
As always when HPMOR is mentioned, this should be required reading
Rationalists don’t assume good faith for evil AI superintelligences or Lord Voldemort, they assume good faith for random Reddit comments. The idea that a big computer could rewrite your entire mind in a couple of sentences is a pretty common theme, actually. Just replace the big computer with a well-prepared neo-nazi and you get the fear behind deplatforming. This is actually something that rationalists agree about with normals in principle, they just disagree about how vast the tricky mind would have to be.