I believe he also started off uncertain of the legality of the fanfic, and praised Rowling when he found that she is ok with any derivative works so long as they don't make money. Of course, if that really is the entire copyright restriction, he could release the fanfic as a "free e-book". Other people have criticized your proposal that you shouldn't write B to help you write A. I definitely agree with what Alicorn said. You based that on an assumption of why he's had any difficulty writing A. Most of the writing I've done is in the form of forum and blog comments. It's always easier to write a second comment after writing a first, for me anyhow. I often respond to something small before coming back to writing a larger post or comment. That's not necessarily Eliezer's reasoning, but there can be reasons to write B to write A. Another point - MoR introduces a lot of concepts which the blog covers more thoroughly. I would expect the book to cover many concepts more thoroughly than the fanfiction does. One thing a person might aim to accomplish with a book whose content is also on a blog is to make the content more compact and organized. I don't think that's the main purpose of MoR! I agree that it makes some ideas more accessible. But how confident are you that those are all of Eliezer's objectives with his book? Do you know who his target audiences are? The ff.net audience is a very select audience. Most don't see themselves as better than most non-ff.net people, as far as I know, but I do think that most people who have heard of the concept of fanfiction think of it by default as something below them. This may be an exceptional fanfic, but lots of people will never read it, because it's a fanfic. And many people have never heard the term "fanfic"! A published book though, that will reach people who make bookstore status purchases. People who have reason to signal that they are rational. They will buy a book with a title they can quote without getting dangerou

Your confusion is due to problems in your map of human behavioural patterns, not due to an incongruous explanation of the motivations for MoR. The discussions surrounding MoR give a powerful status reward, associating writing with social success. That is one of the most powerful forms of behavioural reinforcement, and something I have exploited myself at times.