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?
I don’t think he ever cared that much about Harry Potter in the first place. Much of HPMOR has these odd little uncommented contradictions with the original books that seem to result from skimming or basing your info on fan wikis.
I think he pretty clearly wanted to preach rationalism and decided to weld it onto the most popular IP he could find.
I’m under the impression that he essentially stated as much, though i’m a bit too lazy to go quote mining.