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Vaniver comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapters 105-107 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Does anyone else get the feeling that these "payoff" chapters are less exciting to read than the "mystery" chapters were? This isn't meant to take a stab at Eliezer, I've noticed that in many written works. Ra and Fine Structure were also more fun when they were mysterious. Worm and Pact somehow manage to avoid that, maybe because they don't rely so heavily on mystery, and have fight scenes and character drama to compensate.
Snape's big reveal in canon had a similar effect on me, since it was more or less solved by the readers ahead of time.
IIRC, at the end of The Dark Tower series King breaks the fourth wall and basically says: are you certain you want to read the ending? It will not be as good as you expect, so you might as well stop right here and savor the journey rather than being disappointed by the destination.
That isn't what 'breaking the fourth wall' means- it would be some element of a fictional universe engaging with or acknowledging reality.
I would also like to express my fiery and eternal hatred for the 'happy' ending he wrote. The final ending redeemed for me what was an irredeemable book.
Damn.
I had lost track of Ra until this comment implied that it was completed.
So I read the ending and was soundly disappointed. It had the same ending as an earlier short story of his.
Ah well. I guess it's time to write off sam512 for the foreseeable future.
When the final chapter of Ra was released, I also felt pretty disappointed, so I went back over the story, trying to figure out where it went wrong. I concluded that the turning point was Abstract War, and actually came up with an explanation of everything before Abstract War that made more sense to me than Sam's explanation. It was pretty fun! I've posted it on reddit here.
Well done! That makes a great deal more sense.
Fine Structure is a terrible example, if we're critiquing fiction in general. It literally is a smattering of high-concept puzzle pieces prior to the final two chapters.
Same here, unfortunately, mostly because there haven't really been any surprising revelations so far. I'm holding out hope that Eliezer is going to pull something, though. (Well, not really "holding out hope". More like I'd be extremely surprised if he didn't have something up his sleeve.)
He has said that HPMOR is intended to be "solvable" and that at least one person worked out what was going on (no, I have no idea how much detail that implies) very early on. So I wouldn't be astonished to find that all the remaining Big Ideas have been guessed.
He also said that if someone guessed the entire plot, they'd "know" immediately. I don't think any reader has had a revelation like that yet (apart from the mystery reader who guessed it near the beginning).
It could be that EY is overestimating how "obvious" (for lack of a better word) everyone else will find something "obvious" to him.
That's possible, but (unless I'm misremembering) the one reader who did guess the plot said it seemed "obvious" to him/her as well, which is evidence in favor of it being obvious once you see it.
This could explain the reduced number of comments. As Alsadius pointed out, there used to be 500 comments per chapter, so it stands to logic that as the series advance more users figure it out and stop commenting so as not to spoil it.
Without even leaving a comment saying, "I've figured it out"?
You have a point, though there's no need to. I know I wouldn't, since I can't see what benefit would come from it. Specially if they figured it out between arcs (since there were no discussion threads active, or nearly none at least.) But probably at least a few would've said it and taking into account how many people would've needed to figure it out for that to account for the reduced number of comments, it's strong evidence against it. Sorry, I guess I didn't think it through too much.
These are also way shorter chapters.