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paper-machine comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (339)
Hey gwern, you scared?
Not in the least. As the endgame plays out, I'm more certain than ever I'll win my bet against it winning a Hugo for Best Novel.
To have a chance of winning, MoR needed two things:
The ending is pretty good but not fantastic, and one of the few professionals openly praising it, David Brin, has cooled a bit on it (in part because he's a lazy reader and in favor of his own much more stupid ending, true, but cooled nonetheless), so it has been doing neither and, as it uses up chapter after chapter, sealing its fate. Should've taken my offer to sell the bet at a discount.
I'm not convinced that winning the Best Novel takes professional support, but I'm interested in your argument.
Some best novel vote stats
My guess is that HPMOR isn't going to win-- it isn't obvious that it will be permitted as a nominee. It's a work of fan fiction that doesn't have the original author's permission, and that's made some fans I've talked with nervous.
Other than that, we don't know yet what the rest of the field looks like.
My guess is that if HPMOR wins, it will be because a substantial number of people who wouldn't normally vote for the Hugos vote for it.
Ted Chiang's "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" got a Hugo? Nice, I didn't know that!
Every single story Ted Chiang ever published is original, clever and extremely precise. Too bad he only publishes one short story per year. Check him out if you haven't.
I may be the only person who thought that story was too obvious, though I've been enthusiastic about most of Chiang's work.
This chapter did blow my mind, and it does greatly improve the overall story. But yeah, it needs the professional following; the awarders don't care what blew my mind.
What's Brin's stupid ending?
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-quick-informal-post-on-yudkowskys.html
I think "stupid" is a little strong, personally. But I like the canon ending better.
Brin seems to equate 'rational' with 'non-violent'. They're not always the same thing.
Oh. Boy.
First of all, yes it was. Second of all, Brin's critique is based on literary tropes, not logic. If it's obvious that Voldemort were referring to the train, then the train wouldn't exactly be a prime target, would it.
Brin's response to the anonymous "troll" speaks to his arrogance.
Oh Brin reacts like that to everyone with slightly different ideas. That's nothing though, it actually seems to get personal when it's different ideas about shape of the future in particular. That is particularly amusing to watch.
Ugh... That's such a painful read I had to stop in the middle. Seriously, how is it rational for Harry to be insulting V in English? Even if V somehow does not take offense, one of his Death Eaters will. I know I felt like Adava Kadavra-ing the stupid brat who was pretending to be HJPEV in this...
I just read it, and stupid is precisely what it is.
Context?
Context seems to be here.
I'm also willing to put, let's say, $100 on the line at 5:1 odds that this isn't going to get a Hugo for Best Novel. (Best Fan Writer is far more feasible, though I'd still give it less than even odds if there's a push for it, and less than that if there isn't.) Reasoning: it's an atypical work for the category, which already steeply discounts it; it doesn't display any particular literary fireworks or great innovations in terms of setting or speculative fiction conventions, which is what the Hugos have tended to look for (historically more the later; lately more the former); and it doesn't have any particular following in, or ties to, literary SF fandom as far as I'm aware.
You could argue its significance for the fanfic form but that's going to be a tough sell to Worldcon.
(My actual probability estimate is more along the lines of 50:1 or lower, but I'm not prepared to go through that kind of trouble to win a couple of bucks, nor to risk thousands of dollars on the off-chance that someone knows something I don't.)
It's also not as good as most novels I've read.
Nor I, but most of the novels I've read tend to fall on the spectrum of hard to extremely hard SF, with a preponderance of stuff like Egan, so that's not saying much. What do you usually read?
I'm a fan, but if I were EY I would be worried about getting the nomination and then coming in under No Award. That seems a more likely outcome than somehow winning Best Novel.
Conditional on it being nominated at all, I think it would definitely beat No Award. Have a look at the raw stats from 2013 and 2014; for Best Novel, No Award gets crushed by everything. In 2014, for example, No Award got 88 votes out of 3587 ballots. In a world where MOR made it into the top 5 for Best Novel, it can definitely do better than that.
(Okay, yes, it happened to Vox Day, but that was for Novella, or maybe Novellette, whichever).
EDIT: On re-reading, I think this is a little misleading. The Hugo uses preference voting, so it's possible for No Award to beat some particular candidate even if almost nobody picked it in the first round of voting. You can see this in the data but my summary was too casual.
But like most other commenters, I don't think we do live in that world.
Are you interested in making more bets of this type?
No. (It was not my bet in the first place, so...?)
Oh, sorry, my mistake.