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

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Milkfred E. Moore: Aug 27, 2006; 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.'

Unironic use of the word Omake outside of its proper context. Weeaboo! Weeaboo!

# ? Jan 9, 2017 09:26

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# ? May 16, 2024 00:17

neongrey: Feb 28, 2007; Plaguing your posts with incidental music.

For a while it was pretty popular as a term for bonus material for fanfics, but honestly I am pretty sure it fell out of popular usage not long after the 90s.

# ? Jan 9, 2017 09:30

divabot: Jun 17, 2015; A polite little mouse!

neongrey posted:

For a while it was pretty popular as a term for bonus material for fanfics, but honestly I am pretty sure it fell out of popular usage not long after the 90s.

Still common on fanfiction.net and of course on SpaceBattles, which is ahhh weeaboos from shore to shining shore.

# ? Jan 9, 2017 09:47

Milkfred E. Moore: Aug 27, 2006; 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.'

divabot posted:

Still common on fanfiction.net and of course on SpaceBattles, which is ahhh weeaboos from shore to shining shore.

Spacebattles actually used to have fairly high standards, back when it was more about the fictional versus debates than the fanfiction (Hollewanderer, who I think is the fanfiction mod, was basically taught fluent English by many of the members, for example). It nosedived sometime around 2005-2006 (the admin team even put up a big WE ARE NOT 4CHAN, STOP POSTING IMAGE MACROS announcement) but it never really recovered. It astounds me that the place still exists, really.

# ? Jan 9, 2017 09:53

divabot: Jun 17, 2015; A polite little mouse!

Milky Moor posted:

Spacebattles actually used to have fairly high standards, back when it was more about the fictional versus debates than the fanfiction (Hollewanderer, who I think is the fanfiction mod, was basically taught fluent English by many of the members, for example). It nosedived sometime around 2005-2006 (the admin team even put up a big WE ARE NOT 4CHAN, STOP POSTING IMAGE MACROS announcement) but it never really recovered. It astounds me that the place still exists, really.

Got revived by Worm, I think. For obscure historical first-mover reasons it became the epicentre of Worm fanfic, and now most of the popular threads on Creative Writing are Worm. The mods hate Worm because the characters are teenagers and the site's ephebophilic weeaboos keep trying to write porn of them. The founder of SB offshoot Sufficient Velocity (which formed when SB's owner was AWOL and the site was literally not working properly) proposed banning Worm fic altogether after one particularly appalling story was put up there.

# ? Jan 9, 2017 09:58

neongrey: Feb 28, 2007; Plaguing your posts with incidental music.

divabot posted:

Still common on fanfiction.net and of course on SpaceBattles, which is ahhh weeaboos from shore to shining shore.

Oh yeah, I guess ff.net still exists, huh.

# ? Jan 9, 2017 10:01

Milkfred E. Moore: Aug 27, 2006; 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.'

divabot posted:

(which formed when SB's owner was AWOL and the site was literally not working properly)

Happened many times through SB.com history.

# ? Jan 9, 2017 10:06

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Yudkowksy posted:

Some other readers have been saying a very silly thing, so let me state the following: It is possible that the human species has gotten through its entire history to date without a single professional editor ever sending back a story with a comment reading "This villain is too strong and needs to be weakened." Please bear this in mind when writing your own stories.

What the gently caress does this mean?

# ? Jan 9, 2017 10:08

Milkfred E. Moore: Aug 27, 2006; 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.'

Tiggum posted:

What the gently caress does this mean?

I think he's saying that a professional editor has never told an author that an antagonist is too much of a threat to the protagonist of any given story.

# ? Jan 9, 2017 10:10

Xander77: Apr 6, 2009; Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.

I think this thread needs a constant "how thing actually works IRL vs how Yudkowsky thinks it works" section. Specifically one for the bullying theme, which is wrong on... I don't even know how many levels, but also in general.

# ? Jan 9, 2017 10:12

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Xander77 posted:

I think this thread needs a constant "how thing actually works IRL vs how Yudkowsky thinks it works" section. Specifically one for the bullying theme, which is wrong on... I don't even know how many levels, but also in general.

There's a post tracking all science stuff that's updated through chapter 14. Please feel free to contribute, the current pace is hard to keep up with.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3702281&pagenumber=32&perpage=40#post449678916

i81icu812 fucked around with this message at 10:19 on Jan 9, 2017

# ? Jan 9, 2017 10:15

inflatablefish: Oct 24, 2010

quote:

Are you truly so incapable of understanding your classmates, Potter, or do you dislike them too much to try?

If only Yud listened to his side characters when they try to tell him things...

# ? Jan 9, 2017 15:00

Pvt.Scott: Feb 16, 2007; What God wants, God gets, God help us all

inflatablefish posted:

If only Yud listened to his side characters when they try to tell him things...

I figure Yud is repeating or paraphrasing things that normal people have said to him in real life with lines like those. Since the main character is the author, they both misunderstand or dismiss the criticism of their behavior or genuinely helpful advice. They both retreat to a fortress of smug when some plebe says something that rattles their worldview.

# ? Jan 9, 2017 17:26

OctaviusBeaver: Apr 30, 2009; Say what now?

What was the point of Snape asking about James' bullying and then getting mad when Harriezer answer? He doesn't like that Harry called Lilly a gold digger? I don't understand the point of that conversation.

# ? Jan 10, 2017 00:36

Pvt.Scott: Feb 16, 2007; What God wants, God gets, God help us all

OctaviusBeaver posted:

What was the point of Snape asking about James' bullying and then getting mad when Harriezer answer? He doesn't like that Harry called Lilly a gold digger? I don't understand the point of that conversation.

I think Snape just wanted to feed Harry enough info so he would come to the realization that his birth father was tool. It's more painful if it seems like Harry's opinion rather than just being told the guy was a jerk. Classic manipulator poo poo.

You're right, Snape is mad. He wasn't expecting Harry to "realize" both his parents were dicks. Snape is upset that a 12 year old dared impugn the honor of his dead creepy obsession-waifu. I expect this is how Yud reacts when things don't go as planned;
shutting down, getting angry and lashing out.

Like Stephen King said, "write what you know." That's why most of his books are about authors getting run over by vans.

# ? Jan 10, 2017 08:01

Tunicate: May 15, 2012

divabot posted:

Got revived by Worm, I think. For obscure historical first-mover reasons it became the epicentre of Worm fanfic, and now most of the popular threads on Creative Writing are Worm. The mods hate Worm because the characters are teenagers and the site's ephebophilic weeaboos keep trying to write porn of them. The founder of SB offshoot Sufficient Velocity (which formed when SB's owner was AWOL and the site was literally not working properly) proposed banning Worm fic altogether after one particularly appalling story was put up there.

According to a friend of mine, there's a ton of drama snared up in those communities - she said there are a couple space battles splinter boards, and the admin of the one that isn't explicitly pornographic is a way bigger pervert than the one who is.

Tiggum posted:

What the gently caress does this mean?

Yud has previously said that when writing a crossover fanfic you need to match the any powerup in the protagonist with a proportionate power up in the antagonist, because writing is just like RPG Challenge Ratings.

# ? Jan 10, 2017 11:09

divabot: Jun 17, 2015; A polite little mouse!

Tunicate posted:

According to a friend of mine, there's a ton of drama snared up in those communities - she said there are a couple space battles splinter boards, and the admin of the one that isn't explicitly pornographic is a way bigger pervert than the one who is.

This is approximately correct. The explicitly pornographic one is Questionable Questing and if you read it you get everything you deserve (you can't read the NSFW section without being logged in). The other one is Sufficient Velocity, which forked from SB in 2014 when SB was literally not working properly. All three now run XenForo with approximately the same extensions, and the community floats between the three. All three are dominated by Worm fans.

The anti-porn rules on SB were originally directed against MLP:FIM fans who just wouldn't loving stop it with the underage porn, and got into iterative exploration of the edges of the rules. This led to the mods going "gently caress it, we're fascists now, we knows it when we sees it" and all the examples in the rules being MLP (though not in the latest iteration). This led to QQ existing.

Tunicate posted:

Yud has previously said that when writing a crossover fanfic you need to match the any powerup in the protagonist with a proportionate power up in the antagonist, because writing is just like RPG Challenge Ratings.

Which is a world of facepalm in Worm, given literally the point is there are three levels of "you are utterly outclassed" (normals < parahumans < endbringers < Scion) and the literary point is how to win well outside your class. So of course there are still fuckwits who bring it up in Worm fanfic.

# ? Jan 10, 2017 13:05

Milkfred E. Moore: Aug 27, 2006; 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.'

divabot posted:

This is approximately correct. The explicitly pornographic one is Questionable Questing and if you read it you get everything you deserve (you can't read the NSFW section without being logged in). The other one is Sufficient Velocity, which forked from SB in 2014 when SB was literally not working properly. All three now run XenForo with approximately the same extensions, and the community floats between the three. All three are dominated by Worm fans.

I thought I was going completely mental when I saw that SB.com has, like, upvotes now on posts.

# ? Jan 10, 2017 13:12

Added Space: Jul 13, 2012; Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

People familiar with this fic know large sections are derivative of Ender's Game, a classic novel about a child genius who is forced into military wargame training. What I recently realized is that the borrowing started last chapter. A major structural feature of Ender's Game is a group of completely psychotic and unreasonable bullies set against the protagonist for unclear reasons. This allows the protagonist to succeed through violent means while remaining sympathetic. Here's a link to a great essay on the subject.

Creating the Innocent Killer

Chapter 28: Reductionism

HPMOR posted:

"Okay," Harry said, swallowing. "Okay, Hermione, it's enough, you can stop."

The white sugar pill in front of Hermione still hadn't changed shape or color at all, even though she was concentrating harder than Harry had ever seen, her eyes squeezed shut, beads of sweat on her forehead, hand trembling as it gripped the wand -

"Hermione, stop! It's not going to work, Hermione, I don't think we can make things that don't exist yet!"

Slowly, Hermione's hand relaxed its grasp on the wand.

"I thought I felt it," she said in a bare whisper. "I thought I felt it start to Transfigure, just for a second."

There was a lump in Harry's throat. "You were probably imagining it. Hoping too hard."

"I probably was," she said. She looked like she wanted to cry.

Slowly, Harry took his mechanical pencil in his hand, and reached over to the sheet of paper with all the items crossed out, and drew a line through the item that said 'ALZHEIMER'S CURE'.

They couldn't have fed anyone a Transfigured pill. But Transfiguration, at least the kind they could do, didn't enchant the targets - it wouldn't Transfigure a regular broomstick into a flying one. So if Hermione had been able to make a pill at all, it would have been a nonmagical pill, one that worked for ordinary material reasons. They could have secretly made pills for a Muggle science lab, let them study the pills and try to reverse-engineer them before the Transfiguration wore off... no one in either world would need to know that magic had been involved, it would just be another scientific breakthrough...

It hadn't been the sort of thing a wizard would think of, either. They didn't respect mere patterns of atoms that much, they didn't think of unenchanted material things as objects of power. If it wasn't magical, it wasn't interesting.

This plan is still stupid, but it's at least sweet. Harry is finally using his power to try to help others and do good in the world. Maybe he's learned some compassion and thought for others.

quote:

Earlier, Harry had very secretly - he hadn't even told Hermione - tried to Transfigure nanotechnology a la Eric Drexler. (He'd tried to produce a desktop nanofactory, of course, not tiny self-replicating assemblers, Harry wasn't insane.) It would have been godhood in a single shot if it'd worked.

drat YOU HARRIEZER! :argh:

Eric Drexler is the guy who first hypothesized grey goo nanobots.

One last experiment does succeed in creating carbon nanotubes, but Hermione is unenthusiastic.

quote:

"Harry, I don't think this is working out."

"You mean our relationship?" Harry said. "Great! Let's break up."

That got a slight grin out of her. "I mean our research."

"Oh, Hermione, how could you?"

"You're sweet when you're mean," she said. "But Harry, this is nuts, I'm twelve, you're eleven, it's silly to think we're going to discover anything that no one's ever figured out before."

"Are you really saying we should give up on unraveling the secrets of magic after trying for less than one month? " Harry said, trying to put a note of challenge into his voice. Honestly he was feeling some of the same fatigue as Hermione. None of the good ideas ever worked. He'd made just one discovery worth mentioning, the Mendelian pattern, and he couldn't tell Hermione about it without breaking his promise to Draco.

"No," Hermione said. Her young face was looking very serious and adult. "I'm saying right now we should be studying all the magic that wizards already know, so we can do this sort of thing after we graduate from Hogwarts."

"Um..." Harry said. "Hermione, I hate to put it this way, but imagine we'd decided to hold off on research until later, and the first thing we tried after we graduated was Transfiguring an Alzheimer's cure, and it worked. We'd feel... I don't think the word stupid would adequately describe how we'd feel. What if there's something else like that and it does work?"

"That's not fair, Harry!" Hermione said. Her voice was trembling like she was on the verge of breaking out crying. "You can't put that on people! It's not our job to do that sort of thing, we're kids! "

For a moment Harry wondered what would happen if someone told Hermione she had to fight an immortal Dark Lord, if she would turn into one of the whiny self-pitying heroes that Harry could never stand reading about in his books.

"Anyway," Hermione said. Her voice shook. "I don't want to keep doing this. I don't believe children can do things that grownups can't, that's only in stories."

There was silence in the classroom.

Hermione started to look a little scared, and Harry knew that his own expression had gotten colder.

It might not have hurt so much if the same thought hadn't already come to Harry - that, while thirty might be old for a scientific revolutionary and twenty about right, while there were people who got doctorates when they were seventeen and fourteen-year-old heirs who'd been great kings or generals, there wasn't really anyone who'd made the history books at eleven.

"All right," Harry said. "Figure out how to do something a grownup can't. Is that your challenge?"

"I didn't mean it like that," Hermione said, her voice coming out in a frightened whisper.

Harriezer, tormenting the one person who will willingly spend time with him in order to become famous faster.

He chases her off by acting like a spoiled little monster, then sits down to plan.

quote:

The wizarding world was tiny, they didn't think like scientists, they didn't know science, they didn't question what they'd grown up with, they hadn't put protective shells on their time machines, they played Quidditch, all of magical Britain was smaller than a small Muggle city, the greatest wizarding school only educated up to the age of seventeen, silly wasn't challenging that at eleven, silly was assuming wizards knew what they were doing and had already exhausted all the low-hanging fruit a scientific polymath would see.

Step One had been to make a list of every magical constraint Harry could remember, all the things you supposedly couldn't do.

Step Two, mark the constraints that seemed to make the least sense from a scientific perspective.

Step Three, prioritize constraints that a wizard would be unlikely to question if they didn't know science.

Step Four, come up with avenues for attacking them.

This is done so much better in the Arthimancer series. In that story Hermione follows her interests and explores what's possible. None of this petty, patriarchal guff about knowing better than everyone.

Harry keeps on with Transfiguration, figuring a modern understanding of particles will offer new avenues. Prepare for a load of SCIENCE to the face.

quote:

You could only Transfigure whole objects as wholes. You couldn't Transfigure half a match into a needle, you had to Transfigure the whole thing. Back when Harry had been trapped in that classroom by Draco, it had been the reason he couldn't just Transfigure a thin cylindrical cross-section of the walls into sponge, and punch out a chunk of stone large enough for him to fit through the hole. He would have needed to impose a new form on the whole wall, and maybe a whole section of Hogwarts, just in order to change that little cross-section.

...

Harry wanted to kill his eraser.

He'd been trying to change a single spot on the pink rectangle into steel, apart from the rest of the rubber, and the eraser wasn't cooperating.

It had to be a conceptual limitation, not a real one. Had to be.

Things were made of atoms, and every atom was a tiny separate thing. Atoms were held together by a quantum mist of shared electrons, for covalent bonds, or sometimes just magnetism at close ranges, for ionic bonds or van der Waals forces.

If it came down to that, the protons and neutrons inside the nuclei were tiny separate things. The quarks inside the protons and neutrons were tiny separate things! There simply wasn't anything in reality, the world-out-there, that corresponded to people's conceit of solid objects. It was all just little dots.

And free Transfiguration was all in the mind to begin with, wasn't it? No words, no gestures. Only the pure concept of form, kept strictly separate from substance, imposed on the substance, conceived of apart from its form. That and the wand and whatever made you a wizard.

The wizards couldn't transform parts of things, could only transform what their minds perceived as wholes, because they didn't know in their bones that it was all just atoms deep down.

Harry had focused on that knowledge as hard as he could, the true fact that the eraser was just a collection of atoms, everything was just collections of atoms, and the atoms of the little patch he was trying to Transfigure formed just as valid a collection as any other collection he cared to think about.

And Harry still hadn't been able to change that single part of the eraser, the Transfiguration wasn't going anywhere.

This. Was. Ridiculous.

Harry's knuckles were whitening on his wand again. He was sick of getting experimental results that didn't make sense.

Maybe the fact that some part of his mind was still thinking in terms of objects was stopping the Transfiguration from going through. He had thought of a collection of atoms that was an eraser. He had thought of a collection that was a little patch.

Time to kick it up a notch.

Harry pressed his wand harder against that tiny section of eraser, and tried to see through the illusion that nonscientists thought was reality, the world of desks and chairs, air and erasers and people.

When you walked through a park, the immersive world that surrounded you was something that existed inside your own brain as a pattern of neurons firing. The sensation of a bright blue sky wasn't something high above you, it was something in your visual cortex, and your visual cortex was in the back of your brain. All the sensations of that bright world were really happening in that quiet cave of bone you called your skull, the place where you lived and never, ever left. If you really wanted to say hello to someone, to the actual person, you wouldn't shake their hand, you'd knock gently on their skull and say "How are you doing in there?" That was what people were, that was where they really lived. And the picture of the park that you thought you were walking through was something that was visualized inside your brain as it processed the signals sent down from your eyes and retina.

It wasn't a lie like the Buddhists thought, there wasn't something terribly mystical and unexpected behind the veil of Maya, what lay beyond the illusion of the park was just the actual park, but it was all still illusion.

Harry wasn't sitting inside the classroom.

He wasn't looking at the eraser.

Harry was inside Harry's skull.

He was experiencing a processed picture his brain had decoded from the signals sent down by his retina.

The real eraser was somewhere else, somewhere that wasn't the picture.

And the real eraser wasn't like the picture Harry's brain had of it. The idea of the eraser as a solid object was something that existed only inside his own brain, inside the parietal cortex that processed his sense of shape and space. The real eraser was a collection of atoms held together by electromagnetic forces and shared covalent electrons, while nearby, air molecules bounced off each other and bounced off the eraser-molecules.

The real eraser was far away, and Harry, inside his skull, could never quite touch it, could only imagine ideas about it. But his wand had the power, it could change things out there in reality, it was only Harry's own preconceptions that were limiting it. Somewhere beyond the veil of Maya, the truth behind Harry's concept of "my wand" was touching the collection of atoms that Harry's mind thought of as "a patch on the eraser", and if that wand could change the collection of atoms that Harry considered "the whole eraser", there was absolutely no reason why it couldn't change the other collection too...

The Transfiguration still wasn't going through.

Harry's teeth clenched together, and he kicked it up another notch.

The concept Harry's mind had of the eraser as a single object was obvious nonsense.

It was a map that didn't and couldn't match the territory.

Human beings modeled the world using stratified levels of organization, they had separate thoughts about how countries worked, how people worked, how organs worked, how cells worked, how molecules worked, how quarks worked.

When Harry's brain needed to think about the eraser, it would think about the rules that governed erasers, like "erasers can get rid of pencil-marks". Only if Harry's brain needed to predict what would happen on the lower chemical level, only then would Harry's brain start thinking - as though it were a separate fact - about rubber molecules.

But that was all in the mind.

Harry's mind might have separate beliefs about rules that governed erasers, but there was no separate law of physics that governed erasers.

Harry's mind modeled reality using multiple levels of organization, with different beliefs about each level. But that was all in the map, the true territory wasn't like that, reality itself had only a single level of organization, the quarks, it was a unified low-level process obeying mathematically simple rules.

Or at least that was what Harry had believed before he'd found out about magic, but the eraser wasn't magical.

And even if the eraser had been magical, the idea that there could really exist a single solid eraser was impossible. Things like erasers couldn't be basic elements of reality, they were too big and complicated to be atoms, they had to be made of parts. You couldn't have things that were fundamentally complicated. The implicit belief that Harry's brain had in the eraser as a single object wasn't just wrong, it was a map-territory confusion, the eraser only existed as a separate concept in Harry's multi-level model of the world, not as a separate element of single-level reality.

...the Transfiguration still wasn't happening.

Harry was breathing heavily, failed Transfiguration was almost as tiring as successful Transfiguration, but damned if he'd give up now.

All right, screw this nineteenth-century garbage.

Reality wasn't atoms, it wasn't a set of tiny billiard balls bopping around. That was just another lie. The notion of atoms as little dots was just another convenient hallucination that people clung to because they didn't want to confront the inhumanly alien shape of the underlying reality. No wonder, then, that his attempts to Transfigure based on that hadn't worked. If he wanted power, he had to abandon his humanity, and force his thoughts to conform to the true math of quantum mechanics.

There were no particles, there were just clouds of amplitude in a multiparticle configuration space and what his brain fondly imagined to be an eraser was nothing except a gigantic factor in a wavefunction that happened to factorize, it didn't have a separate existence any more than there was a particular solid factor of 3 hidden inside the number 6, if his wand was capable of altering factors in an approximately factorizable wavefunction then it should drat well be able to alter the slightly smaller factor that Harry's brain visualized as a patch of material on the eraser -

Hermione bursts back into the room and undoes all their work, having remembered that Transfiguration is supposed to be super dangerous.

quote:

"Right..." Harry said slowly. "That's probably one of those things they don't even bother telling you not to do because it's too obvious. Don't test brilliant new ideas for Transfiguration by yourselves in an unused classroom without consulting any professors."

"You could have gotten us killed, Harry!" Hermione knew it wasn't fair, she'd made the mistake too, but she still felt angry at him, he always sounded so confident and that had dragged her unthinkingly along in his wake. "We could have spoiled Professor McGonagall's perfect record! "

"Yes," said Harry, "let's not tell her about this, shall we?"

"We have to stop," Hermione said. "We have to stop this or we're going to get hurt. We're too young, Harry, we can't do this, not yet."

A weak grin crossed Harry's face. "Um, you're sort of wrong about that."

And he held out a small pink rectangle, a rubber eraser with a bright metal patch on it.

Hermione stared at it, puzzled.

"Quantum mechanics wasn't enough," Harry said. "I had to go all the way down to timeless physics before it took. Had to see the wand as enforcing a relation between separate past and future realities, instead of changing anything over time - but I did it, Hermione, I saw past the illusion of objects, and I bet there's not a single other wizard in the world who could have. Even if some Muggleborn knew about timeless formulations of quantum mechanics, it would just be a weird belief about strange distant quantum stuff, they wouldn't see that it was reality, accept that the world they knew was just a hallucination. I Transfigured part of the eraser without changing the whole thing."

Hermione raised her wand again, pointed it at the eraser.

For a moment anger crossed Harry's face, but he didn't make any move to stop her.

"Finite Incantatem," said Hermione. "Check with Professor McGonagall before you try it again."

Harry nodded, though his face was still a bit tight.

"And we still have to stop," said Hermione.

"Why? " said Harry. "Don't you see what this means, Hermione? Wizards don't know everything! There's too few of them, even fewer who know any science, they haven't exhausted the low-hanging fruit -"

"It's not safe," Hermione said. "If we can find out new things it's even less safe! We're too young! We made one big mistake already, next time we could just die! "

Then Hermione flinched.

Harry looked away from her, and started taking slow, deep breaths.

"Please don't try to do it alone, Harry," Hermione said, her voice trembling. "Please."

Please don't make me have to decide whether to tell Professor Flitwick.

There was a long pause.

"So you want us to study," Harry said. She could tell he was trying to keep the anger out of his voice. "Just study."

Hermione wasn't sure if she should say anything, but... "Like you studied, um, timeless physics, right?"

Harry looked back at her.

"That thing you did," Hermione said, her voice tentative, "it wasn't because of our experiments, right? You could do it because you'd read lots of books."

Harry opened his mouth, and then he shut it again. There was a frustrated look on his face.

I bet I know exactly what Harriezer is thinking right now. He's thinking it wasn't the work of others that he studied that helped him succeed, it was his personal devotion to the ideals of Rationalism. That would be a great big Attribution Error right there.

Also, timeless physics is the usual kind of speculative bunk that Quantum Physics attracts. Harry now has a third power to abuse to solve all his problems, and it's all based on technobabble nonsense.

quote:

"All right," Harry said. "How about this. We study, and if I think of anything that seems really worth trying, we'll try it after I ask a professor."

"Okay," Hermione said. She didn't fall over with relief, but only because she was already sitting down.

"Shall we get lunch?" Harry said cautiously.

Hermione nodded. Yes. Lunch sounded good. For real, this time.

She carefully began to push herself off the stone floor, wincing as her body screamed at her -

Harry pointed his wand at her and said "Wingardium Leviosa."

Hermione blinked as the huge weight on her legs diminished to something bearable.

A smile quirked across Harry's face. "You can lift something without being able to Hover it completely," he said. "Remember that experiment?"

Hermione smiled back helplessly, although she thought she ought to still be angry.

And she started walking back toward the Great Hall, feeling remarkably and wonderfully light on her feet, as Harry carefully kept his wand trained on her.

He only managed to keep it up for five minutes, but it was the thought that counted.

These moments of caring really make Harriezer much more awful of a person. He's not a remorseless psychopath who doesn't understand how he's tormenting others. He can be nice. It's that he chooses not to be so much more frequently.

Harry actually does go to Minerva and Dumbledore to explain the idea he had and totally didn't already attempt. Minerva's thoughts and words pound over and over how impossible this idea is and how them Duke boys will never make it over that ravine.

quote:

The two of them started setting up the wards and detection webs. The most important web was the one that checked to make sure no Transfigured material had entered the air. Harry would be enclosed in a separate shell of force with its own air supply just to be certain, only his wand allowed to leave the shield, and the interface tight. They were inside Hogwarts so they couldn't automatically Apparate out any material that showed signs of spontaneous combustion, but they could launch it out a skylight almost as fast, the windows all folded outward for exactly that reason. Harry himself would go out a different skylight at the first sign of trouble.

Harry watched them working, his face looking a little frightened.

"Don't worry," said Professor McGonagall in the middle of her running description, "this almost certainly won't be necessary, Mr. Potter. If we expected anything to go wrong you would not be allowed to try. It's just ordinary precautions for any Transfiguration no one has ever tried before."

Harry swallowed and nodded.

And a few minutes later, Harry was strapped into the safety chair and resting his wand against a metal ball - one that, based on his current test scores, should have been too large for him to Transfigure in less than thirty minutes.

And a few minutes after that, Minerva was leaning against the wall, feeling faint.

There was a small patch of glass on the ball where Harry's wand had rested.

Harry didn't say I told you so, but the smug look on his sweating face said it for him.

I'm surprised she can tell the difference from his resting smug face. Once again, no fussy old lady is a match for our Boy Genius!

They are duly impressed by his success.

quote:

"Congratulations, Mr. Potter!" said Professor McGonagall, and meant it. She would have bet almost anything against that working.

"Congratulations indeed," said Dumbledore. "Even I did not make any original discoveries in Transfiguration before the age of fourteen. Not since the day of Dorotea Senjak has any genius flowered so early."

"Thanks," Harry said, sounding a little surprised.

And now Harry is thinking that he's not the first famous eleven year old after all.

Harry is allowed to practice with Hermione, but they have to keep this a secret. Now he's keeping a secret from Draco, he's keeping the Wizard Gene a secret from Hermione and Dumbledore - do you see the problem yet? Of course not, as long as Harriezer is at the center of the web all these secrets won't hamper progress at all. :rolleyes:

quote:

Just before Harry left the workroom, with his hand on the doorhandle, the boy turned back and said, "As long as we're here, have either of you noticed anything different about Professor Snape?"

"Different?" said the Headmaster.

Minerva didn't let her wry smile show on her face. Of course the boy was apprehensive about the 'evil Potions Master', since he had no way of knowing why Severus was to be trusted. It would have been odd to say the least, explaining to Harry that Severus was still in love with his mother.

"I mean, has his behavior changed recently in any way?" said Harry.

"Not that I have seen..." the Headmaster said slowly. "Why do you ask?"

Harry shook his head. "I don't want to prejudice your own observations by saying. Just keep an eye out, maybe?"

That sent a quiver of unease through Minerva in a way that no outright accusation of Severus could have.

Harry bowed to both of them respectfully, and took his leave.

"Albus," Minerva said after the boy had gone, "how did you know to take Harry seriously? I would have thought his idea merely impossible!"

The old wizard's face turned grave. "The same reason it must be kept secret, Minerva. The same reason I told you to come to me, if Harry made any such claim. Because it is a power that Voldemort knows not."

The words took a few seconds to sink in.

And then the cold shiver went down her spine, as it always did when she remembered.

It had started out as an ordinary job interview, Sybill Trelawney applying for the position of Professor of Divination.

THE ONE WITH THE POWER TO VANQUISH THE DARK LORD APPROACHES,
BORN TO THOSE WHO HAVE THRICE DEFIED HIM,
BORN AS THE SEVENTH MONTH DIES,
AND THE DARK LORD WILL MARK HIM AS HIS EQUAL,
BUT HE WILL HAVE POWER THE DARK LORD KNOWS NOT,
AND EITHER MUST DESTROY ALL BUT A REMNANT OF THE OTHER,
FOR THOSE TWO DIFFERENT SPIRITS CANNOT EXIST IN THE SAME WORLD.

Those dreadful words, spoken in that terrible booming voice, didn't seem to fit something like partial Transfiguration.

"Perhaps not, then," Dumbledore said after Minerva tried to explain. "I confess I had been hoping for something that would help in finding Voldemort's horcrux, wherever he may have hidden it. But..." The old wizard shrugged. "Prophecies are tricky things, Minerva, and it is best to take no chances. The smallest thing may prove decisive if it remains unexpected."

"And what do you suppose he meant about Severus? " said Minerva.

"There I have no idea," sighed Dumbledore. "Unless Harry is making a move against Severus, and thought that an open question might be taken seriously where a direct allegation would be dismissed. And if that was indeed what happened, Harry correctly reasoned that I would not trust that it was so. Let us simply keep watch, without prejudice, as he asks."

Aftermath, 1:

"Um, Hermione?" Harry said in a very small voice. "I think I owe you a really, really, really big apology."

Dear god, have one loving ounce of humility and you won't have to keep sniveling about your rash actions later. Harriezer reminds me of the 80s incarnation of Starscream. Always going own about his own power and cleverness and how he should lead, coming up with hare-brained schemes to gain power over others, and then on his knees apologizing when they inevitably fail.

For some reason we now have an interlude where a young girl is making googly eyes at Professor Snape.

quote:

After class, Alissa approached the desk. Part of her wanted to stand there meekly with her face abashed and her hands clasped penitently behind her back, just in case, but some quiet instinct told her this might be a bad idea. So instead she just stood there with her face neutral, in a posture that was very proper for a young lady, and said, "Professor?"

"Miss Cornfoot," Snape said without looking up from the sheets he was grading, "I do not return your affections, I begin to find your stares disturbing, and you will restrain your eyes henceforth. Is that quite clear?"

"Yes," said Alissa in a strangled squeak, and Snape dismissed her, and she fled the classroom with her cheeks flaming like molten lava.

That's it - wait, I missed the foreword.

quote:

This should again go without saying, but views expressed by Severus Snape are not necessarily those of the author.

Big Yud would totally get some of that schoolgirl action. :pervert:

Added Space fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Jan 12, 2017

# ? Jan 12, 2017 00:26

The Iron Rose: May 12, 2012; Cat Army

oh of course he would.

anyways the arithmancer really does all this better, but kinda gets boring and goes off the rails in the sequel. I mean I hesitate to use the term Mary Sue, but... that's basically what Hermione turns in to.

# ? Jan 12, 2017 00:40

Qwertycoatl: Dec 31, 2008

Of course, Harry's super transfiguration power works fine with his pop-sci understanding of physics. No need to actually put in the effort learning how to solve the equations (or even to know what the equations are).

It's not an isolated incident - later on in the fic he gets another superpower because magic rewards ~rationality~ without requiring him to actually know how to do anything.

I think maybe the author has too high an opinion of what rationality can let people do....

# ? Jan 12, 2017 00:47

poisonpill: Nov 8, 2009; The only way to get huge fast is to insult a passing witch and hope she curses you with Beast-strength.

EVERY MORNING I WAKE UP AND OPEN PALM SLAM BERNIE BOTTS EVERY FLAVOR BEANS INTO MY MOUTH. IT�S GRASS FLAVOR AND PEPPER AND RIGHT THEN AND THERE I START DRYHEAVING ALONGSIDE WITH THE CHARACTER ON MY FROG CARD, DUMBLEDORE. I DO EVERY MOVE AND I DO EVERY MOVE HARD. MAKIN WHOOSHING SOUNDS WHEN I SLAM DOWN SOME IMPERIUS CURSE OR EVEN WHEN I MESS UP TECHNIQUE. NOT MANY CAN SAY THEY ESCAPED AZKABAN, THE WORLDS MOST DANGEROUS PRISON. I CAN. I SAY IT AND I SAY IT OUTLOUD EVERYDAY TO PEOPLE IN MY MAGIC CLASS AND ALL THEY DO IS PROVE PEOPLE IN O.W.L. CLASSES CAN STILL BE IMMATURE JEKRS. AND IVE LEARNED ALL THE SPELL LINE AND IVE LEARNED HOW TO MAKE MYSELF AND MY SLEEPING CHAMBER LESS LONELY BY SHOUTING EM ALL. 2 HOURS INCLUDING WIND DOWN EVERY MORNIng

# ? Jan 12, 2017 00:58

Added Space: Jul 13, 2012; Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

The Iron Rose posted:

oh of course he would.

anyways the arithmancer really does all this better, but kinda gets boring and goes off the rails in the sequel. I mean I hesitate to use the term Mary Sue, but... that's basically what Hermione turns in to.

I'd mostly disagree. There is an unfortunate block of chapters where the same plot of "Umbridge is a horrible bitch, she changes the rules to mess with the main characters, and Hermione fails at metallurgy" is repeated again and again, but for the most part it's solid.

OctaviusBeaver posted:

What was the point of Snape asking about James' bullying and then getting mad when Harriezer answer? He doesn't like that Harry called Lilly a gold digger? I don't understand the point of that conversation.

I think the point was to make the reader question Snape's loyalty. Something like, "Onoz, he only sided with Dumbledore because he loved Lily, now that love is broken and he'll be evil!" Of course Snape is too smart to listen to a little poo poo like Harriezer. I think that's also why we have this little sidestory about a schoolgirl crush.

# ? Jan 12, 2017 01:01

Sit on my Jace: Sep 9, 2016

Some manner of timeless physics is one of Yud's pet theories, if I recall.

# ? Jan 12, 2017 01:40

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Qwertycoatl posted:

Of course, Harry's super transfiguration power works fine with his pop-sci understanding of physics. No need to actually put in the effort learning how to solve the equations (or even to know what the equations are).

It's not an isolated incident - later on in the fic he gets another superpower because magic rewards ~rationality~ without requiring him to actually know how to do anything.

Yud really, really wants this to be true and so writes a fictional world where it is, I think.

# ? Jan 12, 2017 01:45

Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

I know fanfic is by definition allowed to change elements of canon but it's worth pointing out that Transfiguration in HPMOR works nothing like it does in the books / movies (including Partial Transfiguration being a thing that happens multiple times).

Night10194 posted:

Yud really, really wants this to be true and so writes a fictional world where it is, I think.

And he latched onto Harry Potter despite having beliefs which are fundamentally at odds with the main moral of the series and despite not reading half the series. He's not a Harry Potter fan, he's a Harry Potter fanfic fan.

Doctor Spaceman fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Jan 12, 2017

# ? Jan 12, 2017 01:50

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Qwertycoatl posted:

Of course, Harry's super transfiguration power works fine with his pop-sci understanding of physics. No need to actually put in the effort learning how to solve the equations (or even to know what the equations are).

It's not an isolated incident - later on in the fic he gets another superpower because magic rewards ~rationality~ without requiring him to actually know how to do anything.

I think maybe the author has too high an opinion of what rationality can let people do....

I feel compelled to point out that a normal understanding of physics would suggest the molecular mismatches in the partially transfigured object would cause something very weird to happen at the interface between the two materials. Something between the item falling apart and the item exploding due to the steric mismatches, depending on exactly how transfiguration works and what the materials are.

Of course this is all foreshadowing for how yud's new superpower will defeat voldemort im sure.

# ? Jan 12, 2017 01:53

NachtSieger: Apr 10, 2013

The Iron Rose posted:

oh of course he would.

anyways the arithmancer really does all this better, but kinda gets boring and goes off the rails in the sequel. I mean I hesitate to use the term Mary Sue, but... that's basically what Hermione turns in to.

You have a weird definition of mary sue.

# ? Jan 12, 2017 01:53

In It For The Tank: Feb 17, 2011; But I've yet to figure out a better way to spend my time.

I think I read the first two books worth of Arithmancer and remember getting annoyed at how Hermione had to be centrally involved in absolutely everything. To me, it fell into the typical fanfic trap where one character overshadows all the other characters, steals their lines, triumphs, etc. Also that recurring joke about her hitting Voldemort in the face sure got old quick.

# ? Jan 12, 2017 02:11

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

In It For The Tank posted:

I think I read the first two books worth of Arithmancer and remember getting annoyed at how Hermione had to be centrally involved in absolutely everything. To me, it fell into the typical fanfic trap where one character overshadows all the other characters, steals their lines, triumphs, etc. Also that recurring joke about her hitting Voldemort in the face sure got old quick.

To me, part of the whole point of the Arithmancer is that Hermione probably could have overshadowed Harry a lot more than she ever actually did in the books. It's a retelling where Hermione is the brilliant protagonist, with Harry being her stalwart best friend who's good in a fight and has a prophecy hanging over his head, rather than the reverse.

There's a big difference between the 99.999% of fanfics and the tiny percentage that are of at least semi-literary quality in terms of what they're safely able to do to the source material IMO. If you're good enough you can do things like sideline the main character in favor of another and pull it off.

# ? Jan 12, 2017 02:24

The Iron Rose: May 12, 2012; Cat Army

I mean don't get me wrong I still read every update of the Arithmancer and its sequel that I'm forgetting the name of, but it does feel like Hermione kinda overshadows everyone else?

Which is half the point, but it gets a little bit grating when she's tutoring Dumbledore and Professor Sinestra.

Still millions of times better than this abomination mind you. But I prefer things like Renegade Cause or Starnlicht. Especially the latter, because its portrayal of 1590s Magical Britain is really really unique and really really cool.

# ? Jan 12, 2017 02:27

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

The Iron Rose posted:

I mean don't get me wrong I still read every update of the Arithmancer and its sequel that I'm forgetting the name of, but it does feel like Hermione kinda overshadows everyone else?

Which is half the point, but it gets a little bit grating when she's tutoring Dumbledore and Professor Sinestra.

They aren't modern mathematicians :shrug:

She's learned a lot more from Dumbledore than she's given to him in return. It doesn't feel all that much different to me from the interaction between a prodigious graduate student and their mentor from a slightly different discipline that might happen in real life.

Anyway from my understanding timeless physics isn't total hokum. Time isn't really a fundamental property of the universe but an emergent property of object interaction under some fairly well-respected models of quantum physics.

# ? Jan 12, 2017 02:35

Milkfred E. Moore: Aug 27, 2006; 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.'

Doctor Spaceman posted:

I know fanfic is by definition allowed to change elements of canon but it's worth pointing out that Transfiguration in HPMOR works nothing like it does in the books / movies (including Partial Transfiguration being a thing that happens multiple times).

I'm trying to dredge up a series of posts I made in, I think, GBS with Crows or Pick about the generational shift in fan works where older fanfic writers would try to change as little as possible whereas the younger generation seems to have no qualms about upending everything and 'fixing' things. Self-Inserts used to be laughed at but now SI AU is a term used by a lot of fanfic writers and you get more writers, like Yud, who openly admit they don't know much, if anything about the universe beyond names and character traits, so they set it in a high school or something.

Unfortunately, the posts are all gone, it looks like.

# ? Jan 12, 2017 03:13

Tunicate: May 15, 2012

I wasn't around for it but apparently in the early days of internet fanfics there was a shitload of ranma fanfic done by people who hadn't ever seen the original, since there was never an official english release, and lol@downloading anime over dialup.

# ? Jan 12, 2017 03:29

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

The section of Harry figuring out partial transfiguration seriously needs to be cut way, way down. I don't mind the concept behind it, but it's too long and there is an obvious flaw. If partial transifguration is impossible for most people for the reason given, the example of the castle wall is dumb and wrong. Any wizard should be able to conceptualise a brick or stone as a single object distinct from the entire wall. That would still leave Harry's new variation as different and useful without completely blowing the concept.

And all the technical detail that Yudkowsky included to try to look smart is just tedious to read and unnecessary. You can explain it all conceptually without bringing up quantum physics or the stupid poo poo about Buddhism and living inside your skull. All that does is obfuscate the idea.

# ? Jan 12, 2017 06:12

Velius: Feb 27, 2001

Dorotea Senjak is a Black Company reference, which is weird because I didn't think Yud actually read anything prior to writing this story.

# ? Jan 12, 2017 14:05

Pvt.Scott: Feb 16, 2007; What God wants, God gets, God help us all

Velius posted:

Dorotea Senjak

You can't fool me fantasy author! I know the name Dorothy Smith when I see it!

# ? Jan 13, 2017 02:41

mastajake: Oct 3, 2005; My blade is unBENDING!

I really like The Arithmancer and Lady Archimedes, but my god do I get tired of scenes with her parents or ~~~Septima~~~.

# ? Jan 13, 2017 04:19

Fajita Queen: Jun 21, 2012

The Arithmancer (and pretty much all of White Squirrel's stuff) is pretty decent but has a lot of scenes that devolve into wanking over how great Hermione is at solving all of everybody's problems and magically making all the bad poo poo that happens in canon not happen by being Smart.

# ? Jan 13, 2017 04:22

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# ? May 16, 2024 00:17

divabot: Jun 17, 2015; A polite little mouse!

The Shortest Path posted:

The Arithmancer (and pretty much all of White Squirrel's stuff) is pretty decent but has a lot of scenes that devolve into wanking over how great Hermione is at solving all of everybody's problems and magically making all the bad poo poo that happens in canon not happen by being Smart.

so, this story

(and this thread)

# ? Jan 13, 2017 09:55

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

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