#hpmor

[moredifferentthanusual]

hello is anyone still thinking about hpmor in 2024? or is it just me and my creature

[cpericardium]

please take this away from me

[bashetunmaj]

my newfound passion, once upon a time many, many years ago i read harry potter and the philosopher's stone just to read methods now

[fanlore-wiki]

Fanwork Friday: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

This week’s Fanwork Friday is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (also known as HPMOR), a well-known but controversial Harry Potter fanfiction written by Eliezer Yudkowsky which reimagines the plot of the first book through the lens of science and rationality. HPMOR was incredibly popular, with parts of the story translated into 15 languages, and even spawning its own recursive fanworks!

The fanfic also prompted a wide variety of fan responses: for example, it was was often referenced by those outside fannish spaces and praised as an example of the way fanfiction could build on the world of a canon. However, other fans looked much more critically at the story, considering it to be exploiting fandom to promote Yudkowsky’s “rationalist” philosophies and professional work.

If you’re interested in learning more about the fanfic and the many discussions around it, you can read about it on Fanlore!

------

Fanlore does not support or condone the views expressed by J.K. Rowling. We wish only to highlight the transformative nature of fandom and the creativity of fans.

------

We value every contribution to our shared fandom history. If you’re new to editing Fanlore or wikis in general, visit our New Visitor Portal to get started or ask us questions here!

[f1rewalk3r]

hpmor becomes infinitely more entertaining to read if you start imagining the narrator to be a child version of harrier du bois instead of an alien wearing the skin of 11 year old harry potter

[okunichh]

carve your name into my arm, instead of stressed i lie here charmed

[doomer1994]

31.07 🎂

[tayskitter]

Illustration for the amazing story Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

[infraredarmy]

What if Voldemort's spells did exactly nothing to baby HJPEV and he just had autism and an anxiety disorder but wizards had to do all that about it

[derseprinceoftbd]

A friendly reminder that the joint Worm Fandom+Rationalism movement has killed over 38,615 people, exactly one of whom was a landlord. This is genuinely the most evil force in the world today. A dangerous cult movement is rapidly gaining control of both American youth culture and the U.S. government.

[hieronymus-botch]

The twist at the end of HPMOR is so fucking funny when you consider how quirrel was in the early chapters tho. Imagine if at at the end of Dead Poets Society Robin Williams took off his rubber mask to reveal he was Saddam Hussein the whole time doing an elaborate bit and also he never even believed in Islam and just liked killing people and giving the US military a hard time

[katherinakaina]

I also need to add a bit of context to your very short bit about Zizians, @strange-aeons .

TLDR: Ziz left the rationalist community 6 years ago and even at the time she wasn’t liked there, the fact she managed to exploit. Her actions directly contradict both hpmor and what CFAR was doing and teaching. Her other affiliations that are no less relevant include being an anarchist and a vegan. You are not immune to cults just because you are not into any particular weird internet subculture.

Cults form from niche subcultures, that’s true enough. But any subculture can form a cult because any culture, even the mainstream one, contains some ideas that can be twisted to an insane degree. And any ideology, even the most niche and scary one, can be approached casually and sceptically. What is actually needed to create a cult is not a special ideology but a cult leader and vulnerable people to follow them. That is the main uniting quality between all cults. Trying to figure out what’s wrong with a certain music band or a certain fantasy book forum is an exercise in motivated reasoning. You will always end up finding something that's wrong.

The rationalist community was trying to prevent the formation of a cult as best as they could. Partly that’s the reason why people like Ziz and others with bad and unpopular takes were often tolerated longer than necessary. To encourage criticism and prevent getting stuck in a positive feedback loop. Because it’s not a high control group! You cannot be simultaneously mad that people are allowed to talk about wacky ideas on forums and also that the group is supposedly very rigid and controlled. Apparently, they could use some control. Not like it would actually stop an aspiring cult leader from recruiting, they’d just go some other place.

Zizians were not mostly trans by accident (what are the chances?). Ziz was recruiting the most vulnerable people who related to her and were willing to trust her (also because there’s a lot of trans women in the community, like a lot). She used their very real and grounded experience of discrimination to convince them that her not being liked is not due to her takes being bad but because she’s trans.

And she had a lot of takes, some of them not being popular enough you actually complained about. You criticised LessWrong for being too pro-capitalist for your taste and then started talking about the Really Bad rationalists and THEY ARE LEFTISTS killing landlords and cops.

Now if we are talking about ideologies that devalue human life, how about some that require actual Class War (guess what people do in wars) or violent mass uprisings? Or some that require assassinations of certain select individuals? How come you hear that there are people on forums discussing the ethics of murdering those directly responsible for destroying our planet and you, as a leftist, do not immediately recognize yourself in it? Nothing discussed on LessWrong is more violent than a communist revolution or even the killing of Brian Thompson.

Why being into rationality at some point and reading hpmor is the only thing you told about Ziz? I think I know why. All the right wingers really leaned into the whole ‘trans vegan cult’ thing. That is not a good look for our side, is it? How amazing would it be to find a scapegoat. Who cares about those AI safety freaks anyway? They are all cishet men anyway! All cishet men who somehow have an offshoot of violent vegan queers, that certainly adds up.

Ziz being a radical vegan* (another niche subculture) corresponds to her actions way better than anything that's discussed on LessWrong or happened in hpmor. In fact, there’s an exact scene you probably skipped. Harry is on a very important and dangerous mission with Quirrell and at some point he is told to hide while Quirrell duels a cop guard at magical Guantanamo Bay – a total pig and an absolute scum who Ziz would kill without a second thought. Harry does share her sentiment, he fucking hates Azkaban. But when Quirrell tries to kill the evil torture cop Harry instinctively protects him jeopardizing the entire mission. And it’s not a random scene. It starts the entire disillusionment spiral where Harry realizes his beloved groomer professor might be a bad guy. Murder of a bystander whose only crime is being a product of his society is not something Harry can tolerate. He does end up decapitating a bunch of actual death eaters in the very end (the bit you probably did read) to save his own life and defeat Voldemort and even then he regrets it and apologizes for it (despite it being the right thing to do and not even comparable to a random cop). There’s an entire scene where Harry bonds with Draco over their mother’s deaths where he expresses that every death is a tragedy, even deaths of very bad people (like Voldemort).

Not to mention the entire immortalism theme (did you skip the entire third book?). One cannot read hpmor and walk away thinking human life is worthless or only super geniuses deserve to live. Timeless decision theory leading to murdering people is not in there**, nothing in the fic even suggests such a conclusion. More about how you got most things wrong about hpmor here.

Let’s face it, those were a bunch of sleep deprived vulnerable people high on all sorts of radical ideas, who were kicked out of every decent movement and that’s why they slipped into a cult.

Any subculture can become a cult. If you ever read a boring preachy fanfic or ever went to a physical meeting with internet weirdos. If you ever felt rejected by mainstream society and went looking for ‘like-minded people’, for a ‘found family’, for a ‘place where you belong’. You are not safe. Touching grass from time to time is not enough. You have to never leave the pastures to be highly immune to cults. And that ain’t you, my friend. That’s none of us.

Previous post about rationalist community.

* Ever heard ‘veganism is the moral baseline’ (sometimes minimum or imperative)? That’s not a slander, it’s a commonplace argument and an actual slogan.

** The only use of timeless decision theory in hpmor is about being able to reliably cooperate with other well meaning people, not about killing anyone.

[akudollie12]

Stuck in the hpmor rabbit hole

[soupexpertt]

Recently I got recommended a lot of videos criticizing Harry Potter and no videos talking about how great Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is instead. Like, if you want a better version of the story, just read this fanfiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

In his AU:

-Harry gets adopted by Petunia and an Oxford professor and is homeschooled in science

-When he gets into the wizarding world he is irritated by the society’s bigotry and backwardness and wants to change the world by fusing magic and science

-He is accepted into Ravenclaw and so is Hermione

-He befriends Draco instead of Ron and slowly makes him question his beliefs and actually become a better person

-Hermione has a lot of screen time and her own arcs including the one where she fights against misogyny in heroism

-there’s a homestuck reference

-there’s a death note reference

-at some point Harry bullies the sorting hat

-Voldemort (or rather his actual identity) is a well-written character with interesting backstory and goals

- the plot point where Harry is Voldemort’s horcrux plays a big role in this

-at some point Voldemort uses a gun

-there’s a scientific explanation to how spirits and patronus work

-there’s an mlp reference

-one of the hocruxes is in space

-the Philosopher’s stone is canonically created by two lesbians and one of them is baba yaga

[couldtheysurviveshibuya]

Hmm, something went awry, here.

(Art by talespirit)

[a-thousand-pots]

A new chapter of my long fic. Pretty close to the 200k mark :)

With a gap of 5 months and 6 days between chapters, I’m successfully staying at a rate of above 2 chapters per year.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/50342836/chapters/171242728#main