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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Open Thread: April 2010 - Less Wrong
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Yeah, I don't think I can plausibly deny responsibility for this one.
Googling either (rationality + fanfiction) or even (rational + fanfiction) gets you there as the first hit, just so ya know...
Also, clicking on the Sitemeter counter and looking at "referrals" would probably have shown you a clickthrough from a profile called "LessWrong" on fanfiction.net.
Want to know the rest of the plot? Just guess what the last sentence of the current version is about before I post the next part on April 3rd. Feel free to post guesses here rather than on FF.net, since a flood of LW.com reviewers would probably sound rather strange to them.
Voldemort's Killing Curse had an epiphenomenal effect: Harry is a p-zombie. ;)
I don't like where this is headed - Harry isn't provably friendly and they're setting him loose in the wizarding world!
Also, there is a sharply limited supply of people who speak Japanese, Hebrew, English, math, rationality, and fiction all at once. If it wasn't you, it was someone making a concerted effort to impersonate you.
Do I have to guess right? ;)
It gets a strong vote of approval from my girlfriend. She made it about halfway through Three Worlds Collide without finishing, for comparison. We'll see if I can get my parents to read this one...
Edit: And I think this is great. Looking forward to when Harry crosses over to the universe of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover.
Let's make that a Prediction. Harry becomes the ultimate Dark Lord by destroying the universe and escaping to the Metametaverse of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover.
This Harry is so much like Ender Wiggin.
Really? I picture him looking like a younger version of this.
This Harry and Ender are both terrified of becoming monsters. Both have a killer instinct. Both are much smarter than most of their peers. Ender's two sides are reflected in the monstrous Peter and the loving Valentine. The two sides of Potter-Evans-Verres are reflected in Draco and Hermione. The environments are of course very similar: both are in very abnormal boarding schools teaching them things regular kids don't learn.
Oh, and now the Defense Against the Dark Arts prof is going to start forming "armies" for practicing what is now called "Battle Magic" (like the Battle Room!).
And the last chapter's disclaimer?
If the parallels aren't intentional I'm going insane.
And going back a few chapters, I'm betting that what Harry saw as wrong with himself is hair-trigger rage.
Ooo, I missed that. Yeah, OK.
There is a reason I didn't look for it. It isn't done. Having found it anyway via link above, of course I read it because I have almost no self-control, but I didn't look for it!
Are you sure you wouldn't rather have the mashed potatoes? There's a sack of potatoes in the pantry. I could mash them. There's also a cheesecake in the fridge... I was thinking of making soup... should I continue to list food? Is this getting anywhere?
This is a lot of fun so far, though I think McGonnagal was in some ways more in the right than Harry in chapter 6. Also, I kind of feel like Draco's behavior here is a bit unfair to the wizarding world as portrayed in the canon - the wizarding world is clearly not at all medieval in many ways (especially in the treatment of women where the behavior we actually see is essentially modern), so I'm not sure why it should necessarily be so in that way. Regardless of my nitpicking it's a brilliant fanfic and it's nice to see muggle-world ideas enter the wizarding world (which always seemed like it should have happened already).
You also have the approval of several Tropers, only one of which is me.
Holy fucking shit that was awesome.
I normally read within {nonfiction} U {authors' other works} but I had such a blast with Methods of Rationality that I might try some more fiction.
This story reminded me distinctly of Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past -- you might enjoy that one. Harry works until he's 30 to kill Voldemort, and by the time he succeeds, everyone he loves is dead. He comes up with a time travel spell that breaks if the thing being transported has any mass, so he kills himself, and lets his soul do the travelling. 30-year-old Harry's soul merges with 11-year-old Harry, and a very brilliant, very prepared, very powerful, and deeply disturbed young wizard enters Hogwarts.
Similar in premise is "The Mirror of Maybe" (slash warning, never-updates warning) in which a fifth-year Harry is shown a hypothetical future and uses the extensive knowledge gained thereby to ditch school, disguise himself as an adult, and become the greatest Gary Stu of all time. Slightly AU magic system and, as I warned, it never freakin' updates.
lol
I've finished reading that.
It's very well written technically - better than Eliezer who overindulges in speechifying, hyperbole, and italics - but in general Harry doesn't seem disturbed enough, heals too easily, and there are too few repercussions from his foreknowledge. (Snape leaving and usurping Kakaroff at Durmstang seems to be about it.)
That, and the author may never finish, which is so frustrating an eventuality that I'm not sure I could recommend it to anyone.
AH... spoiler!
Snape leaving is hardly a spoiler, since so far it hasn't affected anything...
I like all of Eliezer's fiction... if you want more like this, see the pseudo-sequel, http://lesswrong.com/lw/18g/the_finale_of_the_ultimate_meta_mega_crossover/ It is too insane of a story to recommend to most people, but assuming you've read Eliezer's non-fiction, you can jump right in.
Otherwise, just about all of Eliezer's fiction is worth reading, Three World's Collide is his best work of fiction.
It's now the second hit on Google for (rationality + fiction)!
What proportion of the whole story are the current ten (nine) chapters likely to be?
(There is going to be more, right? Right?!)
It's almost done, actually. Here's a sneak preview of the next chapter:
just kidding
that that is an excerpt or that you are almost done?
How proud of myself should I feel for figuring out how Comed-Tea works before Harry did? (Keeping in mind that it's been years since I internalized the facts that in the Harry Potter universe, prophecies work and Time-Turners don't create alternate time-lines, information not available to rational!Harry.)
Not very. Tons of commentators glommed onto the non-time-warping explanation, and the fic all but tells us that this is a possibility, especially with the experiment vignette with Hermione on the train.
(Personally, I don't like the idea that the Comed-Tea affects only Harry; that mechanism leaves Luna Lovegood as an ethically depraved libeller.)
Or just charmingly nutty.
Or her father, at least. (I think there was an author's note about this - she says vague things and he turns them into ridiculous headlines.)
Well, that's just great - how am I supposed to know that now with Eliezer's little erasure system?
I suppose better Xenophilius being a depraved libeller than Luna... although as an adult it's even more inexcusable.
I was looking over the old chapters and I found this:
Good to know.
And what does Voldemort have to do with anything?
He's not Harry's target, he's just a stumbling block in the middle. You're not fooling me that easily. :P
This Harry is so much more potentially powerful than canon Harry, therefore having canon Voldemort be the final boss would be a let-down. Eliezer's author description explicitly says that anything which strengthens the hero must be accompanied by a corresponding increase in the difficulties he will face, so I think we can be pretty confident that things are going to be much more awesome than just defeating Voldemort with the Potterverse equivalent of RPG rules exploitation.
Besides, even you had that happen in your story and had a dementor munching on the back of Quirrell's head, wouldn't the result be the equivalent of destroying only a single horcrux? (unless the bits of soul are linked in such a way that the dementor can suck them all up at a distance through the one...)
You can't escape writing the rest of this that easily! ;)
Also, hrm... would your comment here then count as you doing a parody fanfic of your own fanfic?
It could be one chapter where they debate whether or not to sic the dementor on Quirell without even confronting him, then one chapter where they figure out how to magically triangulate and destroy all of the Horcruxes at once.
Shhhh... Stop trying to make it easy for him to end the story sooner than later. ;)
(Nevermind some of the grayer ethical aspects of, in a world with potentially eternal afterlife, Moldy Voldy's crimes may not stack up to that. (That is, "destroying a soul" >>> "killing someone" in the potter verse. Probably even "killing many someones" (otoh, IIRC the Dementor's were to a large extent his creatures, so we can probably safely assume that he was involved with or arranged for (or, more to the point, would in the future arrange for) plenty of soul consuming/destroying))
Well, by way of contrast, this point in the original book took us up to page 121 of 309. The story is currently 44,000 words which is approximately half the length of the average novel. However, we still haven't seen any deviation from the original story which suggests that Harry's opposition will be much harder, so I'm inclined to go with the first estimate, which gives us about 1/3 of total length so far. Not counting any sequels, of course.