The trouble with Stephenson's books is that he tends to make a lot of stuff up and insert it into the exposition in such a way that it's difficult to tell it from the trustworthy material. Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle aren't so bad about this, but someone who'd, say, learned most of their neoplatonic philosophy from Anathem might come out the other side with some very strange ideas indeed -- even if they'd thought, and bothered, to look up the real-world cognates of all his academic smeerps.
Charles Stross is another author with similar habits -- although his style is more referential, which makes it essential to keep a laptop with a Wikipedia tab open next to the chair you're reading in, but ends up drawing a somewhat clearer line between science and fiction.
Can I just say I experienced mind-boggling surprise (and a corresponding increase in my respect for you) when I realized that was not a TVTropes link?
The new thread, discussion 13, is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. With three chapters recently the previous thread has very quickly reached 1000 comments. The latest chapter as of 25th March 2012 is Ch 80.
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.)
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.
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: