Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81

bogdanb

9 Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81

27th Mar 2012

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This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 81, which should be published later today. The previous thread passed 400 comments as of the time of this writing, so it will pass 500 comments soon after the next chapter is posted, if not before. I suggest refraining from commenting here until chapter 81 is posted; comment in the 12th thread until you read chapter 81. After chapter 81 is posted, I suggest all discussion of previous guesses be kept here, with links to comments in the previous thread.

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.) When posted, chapter 81 should appear here.

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81 — LessWrong

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Alsadius14y-10

Well, Sturgeon's Law for a start, combined with the fact that people who don't bother to create their own universes are statistically going to be less-motivated, less-experienced, and/or less-competent authors. There's a reason that the stereotype of fanfic authors is 13 year old girls. I'm glad for the exceptions, but they are exceptions.

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AspiringKnitter14y100

Sorry, the reason for the stereotype is the fact that fanfiction is findable only on unmoderated internet archives where anyone can post. If you had to look on the internet for all your original fiction, you'd have the same problem. Also, it's in some ways harder to use someone else's voice and be bound by characters that maybe have traits you're scared to write about than to be able to write in your own voice and avoid certain kinds of characters.

But when you compare cherry-picked original fiction weeded through by editors until you get to read only a fra... (read more)

-3Anubhav14y

4Nornagest14y

I think that's probably true -- but not for the reasons you seem to be implying, and not with any particular implications for authors' romantic success. Fanfic seems to be a highly generational phenomenon; there have been shared universes and exchanges of what we now call fanfic going back arguably to the Twenties (the weird fiction genre was highly incestuous), but the form only really took off with the arrival of the Internet. So its authorship's going to be heavily skewed towards younger writers, who are almost by definition less competent and experienced. However, literally every fanfic writer that I've ever met -- which is nowhere near an unbiased sample and skews somewhat older than the average, but still -- has work in at least one original universe as well. I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to find many genre fiction fans with writing skills that don't. So I doubt you can use that feature of the form to prove much about its authors.

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