Let's Read: "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Let's Read: "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"

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Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Tiggum posted:

Read more books. Or even watch more movies.

Just read the first three books of the Dune series how to see what it looks like when a competent author gets a hold of the idea and does it right... and creates a fully fleshed-out and fascinating universe with a bevy of relatable characters on top of that practically as an afterthought.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2019 12:36

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 12:22

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Worm is kind of amazing in that it takes basically every stereotypical and clich�d superhero comic power ever and demonstrates how completely horrible the world would be if you handed those powers to real people who actually act like people would, instead of unrealistically heroic figments of our imagination. I'll always kind of respect that story for how completely it sucks you into that "...this unpleasantly believable" mindset.

As a story it has... issues, though. The whole thing could've stood to be half as long.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2019 13:01

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

I've always kind of disliked time travel as a central story conceit, because it tends to be employed in one of two ways: as a "fish out of water" story where the time travel really exists only as a plot device to set up the circumstances of the story the author actually wants to tell, or in the form of a closed time loop where time travel and the effects of time travel are central, but in a manner that effectively removes all agency from the protagonists of the story - their success or failure are pre-ordained even more than is usual for fiction and in a way where you can often tell the specifics of it right from the beginning. The best analogue to closed loop time travel stories, in my opinion, would be locked room murder mysteries: it's entirely obvious what the eventual result will be and the point is less the crime itself and more figuring out whodunnit from the context clues.

It is surprisingly rare for a novel to not only feature time travel, but to allow its characters to actually make meaningful changes. Even if don't think all that much of your opinion on the quality of HPMOR itself, if you've got any good suggestions for books that feature well-executed time travel, then I'm certainly all ears.

Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Aug 19, 2019

# ¿ Aug 19, 2019 13:59

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Worm was pretty definitely written with an eventual escalation to a literally world-shattering crisis in mind from the start. I'm the last person who would say the story doesn't have a lot of problems (god knows I could never make it all the way through) but "threat escalation" isn't a justified criticism as these kinds of thing go.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2019 16:53

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Jazerus posted:

it's not executed well.

I'm not arguing about whether it's executed well, I'm saying that you can't claim that it has "the escalation problem" because the escalation problem stems from bad writers not planning out their story far enough and needing to continually one-up themselves to keep up the tension. For all its flaws, this certainly isn't the case here.

Whether you think it succeeds in making the smooth transition from small-time local crime to multiversal world-saving is up to you to decide. I can appreciate its ambition in trying to simulate the entire "life cycle" of a comic superhero in a single story, but even then I personally like it more as a setting and collection of character arcs than as a story, so it's not like I really disagree with you there. Still, fair's fair.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2019 17:50

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

I decided not to ever touch Ward when I read that Panacea goes to an alternate universe, conquers herself a planet and starts calling herself Red Queen, so yeah.

e: somewhat appropriately, I get the impression that Ward reads a lot like a bad Worm fanfic. Fitting, I suppose, considering how much of that it has spawned.

Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 10:21 on Aug 20, 2019

# ¿ Aug 20, 2019 10:05

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Roadie posted:

"Real people" is a stretch. Worm strains like hell to try and justify things like why no civilians ever just shot any of the not-actually-super-tough villains, why people with superpowers wouldn't just get big bucks jobs in search and rescue or industrial resource extraction, why the government puts up with any of this poo poo instead of dropping a Hellfire missile on the head of supers who cause trouble, etc.

"Kinda, but also not" is how I'd respond to that, I guess. The setting is certainly contrived to some degree, if only because it's difficult to come up with a way to drop something like superpowers into a "real world" and portray the results of that in a way that everyone can agree is 'realistic.' It's not something that has ever happened, so everyone gets to basically pull their own opinion out of their rear end. Has to, really, for lack of any historical examples to base it on.

What I really meant was that I think the people, as in the actual characters shown in the story, behave and think and act in a way that I could believe real people would, if put into their situation. The heroes aren't like comicbook characters, not even the grim and edgy ones. Even the villains have this sense of banal, human evil to them, which is something I really liked. Like, I could point you at a hundred people who probably only didn't end up as a Jack Slash or what have you for lack of having a trauma-induced superpower dropped into their lap.

Well, your mileage may vary. It's a very fine difference and you might not find it as noticeable as I do.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2019 11:38

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

I'm not a native speaker, aren't they pronounced the same way in English?

And yes, it does kind of hinge on you being able to accept that a magical space whale is using the whole of planet Earth as a petri dish. It's really just a fantasy story dressing up as science fiction, though, kind of like Star Wars, so I don't hold that against it.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2019 12:15

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

The point of space whale science is to find a way to reverse entropy. Killing each other is an edge case - space whale 1 and space whale 2 are stated to have run into space whale 3 on their way into Earth whalespace and done some peaceful trading during the encounter.

I'm guessing it's supposed to make them feel more vast and alien. They're concerned about the eventual heat-death of the universe because they can realistically expect to live long enough on an individual basis that it becomes a problem.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2019 17:06

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

YaketySass posted:

it's just sci-fi Madoka

Yeah, it really pretty much is.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2019 09:43

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Someone please explain to the poor guy that rationalism is about rationality in the same way that scientology is about science.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2019 02:11

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Monocled Falcon posted:

But since they're not conscious, thinking beings they can't approach the problem directly, they can only amass information and iterate on their 'shards' via an evolutionary design process.

Basically yes, but not for quite that reason. The whole thing is held pretty vague and a lot of the entities' motivations honestly don't make a whole lot obvious sense, but that's at least partly because they're supposed to come across as just far too big and far too alien to really understand how they think even if you know what and why they're doing it. There's a lot that's intentionally never really shown from the inside point of view, as it were.

One thing you definitely got wrong is that they are sapient, but they don't really have a singular or defined mind the way human beings do. Like, consciousness, psyche and subconsciousness, in people those are basically made out of one piece and just what a mind is, as far as most people are concerned. If our mind was an object, it would be a brick, because it stays one shape all your life and you basically can't add or remove anything from it.

By comparison, an entity would be made of legos. One of the weirdest things about the setting is how handing out shards is not the same as handing out tools, it's like handing out parts of yourself. An entity is really only itself when it's complete. Imagine handing someone your ability to appreciate irony, or your skill at interior design. It would obviously change the way you work, and even if these things were able to think for themselves, they'd not really capable of seeing the world in terms of anything but irony or shades of pastel.

So basically, that's what they do, and it's why even Scion isn't actually an entity - he's more the command unit and failsafe. The biggest part, the most complete part, but still not everything of himself. Their mode of existence is the mental landscape that it evolved, is all about finding the right tool for the right job, because it's so easy for them to integrate entire skillsets in the blink of an eye. The downside is that they're not really designed to think creative, to do that "making the best of what you have" thing that people do when there's nothing else to be done. They just don't think that way.

So that's what they're pretty much outsourcing to humanity. Hosts constantly come up with strangely effective ways to use their powers that would never have occurred to an entity, although they're aware that it's fundamentally something a shard ought to be capable of. All they know tells them entropy is inescapable, but they might have thought the same about using long protein chains synthesized by arachnids as improvised triplines, and eventually Skitter's shard integrates that to the point where it does so independently, just because it's such a clever idea.

And if it takes another 3000 cycles until the attempt pays off, then that's perfectly alright by them.

Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Aug 31, 2019

# ¿ Aug 31, 2019 19:06

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Sabriel is more like backwards Harry Potter: girl goes away from boarding school to learns about friendship and magic. And then she looks for her dad or... something? I gotta admit, I don't really remember. Has absolutely nothing otherwise in common with HPMOR, though.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2019 12:43

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

I meant that in the sense that there's a degree of similarity in the basic premise, not that boarding schools actually play a substantial role in it. I can understand how one would come up in a conversation about the other, is what I mean, although they really don't have much in common at all once you get past that.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2019 22:09

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Keys to the Kingdom certainly isn't bad, but it's also very noticeably young adult.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2019 23:22

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

lol, no. It is straight trash garbage. This is a mock thread.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2019 23:17

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

They differ widely between "has awful taste" and "does not have awful taste," hth.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2019 00:17

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Yeah, it's not too different from that, really. A lot of posts in this thread go into how this story really fails at its own premise (the whole "scientifically investigating magic" angle) and instead quickly becomes nothing more than an extended power trip for the author self-insert. It tends to appeal largely to people who can identify with that to some degree.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2019 02:51

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Which would honestly be a funny and entertaining idea if it wasn't also so soapboxy about the author's own conservative beliefs. I mean, that story tries to make George Bush look effective and charismatic.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2019 14:53

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Just because the guy can do subtlety doesn't mean it's not also an opinion piece, tho.

VVV Can't argue with that.

Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Sep 9, 2019

# ¿ Sep 9, 2019 15:38

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

That's the most American thing I've ever read. I'll admit it, I laughed.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2019 17:02

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

It kind of is. Just look at one Senator Armstrong.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2019 00:58

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Not sure how having it in ebook format would be any worse than already having it published for free on the internet for years not anyway.

Also, that didn't stop John Dies At The End to get published on paper eventually, so it's spurious reasoning either way.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2019 14:19

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

I mean, I get where the guy might get the idea, it just doesn't seem like the fear is warranted.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2019 15:07

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Which wouldn't be so bad, if idiot Silicon Valley weren't giving him annoying amounts of money for his incompetence, too.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2019 09:15

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Darth Walrus posted:

A GiveWell Director very politely ripping into the Singularity Institute was fun.

quote:

The argument advanced by SI for why the work it's doing is beneficial and important seems both wrong and poorly argued to me. My sense at the moment is that the arguments SI is making would, if accepted, increase rather than decrease the risk of an AI-related catastrophe

Translation: gently caress you, you maladjusted ultranerds.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2019 11:41

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

alexandriao posted:

You know, as much as I despise Yud and his followers, and the philosophy he espouses, I don't disagree with his general (originally stated) goal, to add more consistency to a series of novels where the magic system was too underdeveloped to be interesting. There are worse problems with the books, like Harry not actually having any kind of effect on the plot, etc. But for some reason, the magic system always bugged me the worst. Mostly, how Rowling never bothered to put any effort into developing it. It's emblematic of a lot of the problems in Rowling's writing, and political beliefs -- that she puts nothing more than a surface-depth thought into anything. It explains her most recent remarks -- a lot of them are driven by "hey this is neat, and will get me retweets and popularity, I'll tweet it!!".

This kind of criticism always makes me think of people who complain that Pokedex entries don't make sense. It seems like a lot of adult fans of the books kind of seem to forget that this is a series of books written for children ages ten and up, not grown men who want "depth" and "complexity" in their fairy tale story. Harry Potter magic runs on whatever seemed cool or wondrous at the time because that's what works for children. You can't rewrite the story to make sense under a "hard" Sanderson-style magic system and have it still work, because it wasn't supposed to be that kind of story.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2020 10:58

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Qwertycoatl posted:

It kind of turns into that kind of story as the books go on, mostly to its detriment.

Voldemort fails to kill Harry as a baby in the first book because Harry is protected by his mother's love.

Voldemort fails to kill Harry in the last book because Voldemort thinks he became master of the Elder Wand by defeating Dumbledore, but he doesn't realise that technically it was Malfoy who defeated Dumbledore and Harry defeated Malfoy.

It's part of why I think the first four books are the only really good ones, yeah. The moment they started taking themselves seriously, everything just kinda went off a cliff.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2020 12:25

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Isn't that mentioned as early as Halfblood Prince? I could swear it's made out to be a big thing that's specific to the elder wand.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2020 15:30

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Jazerus posted:

this kind of scolding is something that has never really made sense to me. hpmor is a particularly clumsy and bad attempt at "grounding" a fictional story, but that doesn't mean the entire genre is misguided. the goal is not to "have it still work" in the sense of retaining exactly the same plot beats, themes, and setting details, but more "realistic" - generally these kinds of stories end up spiraling away into something very different from their source material because the more "realistic" setting demands that things happen differently. this can be handled well (rarely) or poorly (usually) but it's not an invalid idea for a story

I don't disagree, it's not an invalid idea for a story. It's just not the idea for the kind of story that the actual Harry Potter books wanted to be, which is why those stories always spiral away from it. You can tell a story like that. It just won't be Harry Potter, because the entire setting runs on being silly and making only as much coherent sense as the narrative demands.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2020 16:39

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 12:22

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

animist posted:

HPMOR, on the other hand, aims for rigor.

Correction: it claims to aim for rigor, but when it comes to Harry Potter fanfics that are written around the idea of scientifically investigating magic, it's actually one of the worst around. Harriezer pulls new powers of his rear end exactly when the plot demands it, no sooner and no later. There is no more rhyme or reason to it than to anything the novels also do.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2020 23:24

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Let's Read: "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"

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