Is someone who has never read any of the Harry Potter books and is not a fan of the movies likely to appreciate this work? I’m somewhat curious to read it but suspect I’d have trouble following the references.
I probably need to write up a “For those who have never seen the books” summary page of years 1-7, containing all the information that will be needed mixed with enough other information that it looks like a summary instead of “here is exactly and only what you will need to know”.
I never read any of the original Harry Potter books but found the fanfic quite enjoyable overall. At least one big plot point utterly confused me until I looked up “Quirrell” and “horcrux”. Also Eliezer chose to make Harry a badass a la Ender Wiggin, which I thought was in very poor taste, but I guess most people can just ignore this.
I’m not complaining about story balance. I just don’t enjoy this particular brand of wish fulfillment—fantasizing about a nerd that could stare down five big bullies and still stay a nerd.
I wonder if Eliezer has or should read this review of Ender’s Game (a book I never read myself, but the reviewer seems to provide a useful warning to authors).
Yeah, I was wondering when this link would come up. Not sure about Eliezer, but I read this review sometime ago and it matched my impressions of the book perfectly.
Me too, though I had many of those same misgivings while reading the book. The difference between me and everybody else in my peer group—who loved Ender’s Game—is that I first read it as an adult, and they all read it first as teenagers or before.
To gather some actual data, I’m curious how many people there are here who first read it as a young teenager and didn’t love it, or first read it as an adult and did love it.
I read it as a teenager and didn’t love it. Many things annoyed me, but most of all the insanity of training Ender and company exclusively in skills other than the ones they would actually use (people floating in space with hand-held lasers) rather than the skills they needed. Also the absence of anything that looked AT ALL like a bell curve distribution of ability. The battle school kids are all supposed to be massively well selected and trained, yet only Ender, Bean, Valentine and Peter really matter. The battle school kids in general are all an absurd backdrop just to train “the one” who has been identified ahead of time. Finally, overly complex plans working annoyed me a bit and extreme military/governmental competence annoyed me more.
True Names and other Dangers is a weird case of an anarcho-libertarian writing a story showing extreme military/governmental competence.
Probably a stored rant here, but the thing that put me off most from Ender’s Game (which I’d read as an adult) was that the adults con a child into pushing the button which wipes out an alien race, and with the intent of absolving themselves from responsibility. IIRC, Ender actually does accept (partial?) responsibility in a later book.
Even though I’ve become more cynical since I read that book, I still think the adult behavior was well outside the human range. The normal thing is to blame the aliens for humans thinking it made sense to wipe them out.
I think its trickier than that—the adults are portrayed as being incapable of the “necessary” brilliance and/or ruthlessness. They put Ender in the hotseat because they hope he’ll do “something to win” without really visualizing what that something might entail. He’s simultaneously their “more powerful optimizing process” and (using LW terminology that makes me a little uncomfortable) their shabbos goy.
Its possible that the first two books were written specifically to explore the structure of moral reasoning in situations like this. How do people morally process a genocide that no specific person directly and obviously intended, especially if their theory of moral reasoning hinges primarily on intent?
I don’t mean to pull a Godwin, but there may (intentionally?) be a strong set of correspondences between Ender and Hitler, with a literary goal of getting people to “identify and forgive Hitler”—that is, the whole book may be a literary “Godwin prank”. I should note that this is not my original analysis, in part because I know almost nothing about “Hitler scholarship”. The original insight came from Elaine Radford, I heard about it via a K5 post by a friend of hers telling the story of how Orson Scott Card freaked out and tried to bully her into not publishing the analysis after book two but before book three (which was massively delayed, possibly because of the review if you buy the K5 story). The analysis was later cited in Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality.
For reference, I read Ender’s Game and really liked it when I was about 12. After my brother and I read it we tried to get our mom to read it and she stopped like 20 pages in because the horrific child abuse turned her stomach.
I stopped reading Card in my 40s or thereabouts because, while I was fascinated by the character torture, I became uncomfortable with my fascination. I’d earlier realized that there’s something really creepy about a lot of the older male characters in Card—they do horrific things which are justified in the text.
Discovering that you can no longer stand a book you used to love is sometimes called “the book was visited by the suck fairy”.
More recently, (on the strong recommendation of a friend) I read Empire, and amazingly, it has a positive father/son relationship.
“Also the absence of anything that looked AT ALL like a bell curve distribution of ability. The battle school kids are all supposed to be massively well selected and trained, yet only Ender, Bean, Valentine and Peter really matter. ”
If you select out the right end of the bell curve from the general population, then you won’t have a bell curve anymore, but rather a fat lower end.
Also, the training was supposed to be a sort of abstract sport to select for leadership skill, coolness under pressure, etc—it wasn’t supposed to be actually training them to fight in space. They did training of the actual spaceshippy stuff later. You could certainly argue they should have started that earlier though.
You should have something that looks like the right end of a bell curve, e.g. very little variation, especially with feedback loops from ability shaping environment shaping ability cut short by the tight external control on environment.
abstract sport to select for leadership skill, coolness under pressure
“The playing fields of Eton.”
But since the final application was video games, why not train under that form of pressure? There is plausibly something to be said for physical activity and proximity to teammates and opponents for building teamwork and leadership.
I read it in middle school, and, though I know there’s a tendency to see my earlier self as having the benefit of hindsight, I swear that while I really enjoyed the cathartic nerd-violence, I also had an awareness that there was something creepy and wrong with the whole thing, even if I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was both attracted to and horrified by the book. I had a faint sense that feeling that self-righteous is a very dangerous sign.
I then largely forgot about it (it seems to have strongly influenced a lot of people who read it at that age, but not me) until I reached adulthood and stumbled on criticism from Kessel and Radford, whereupon it all fell into place and I congratulated myself on having seen that there was at least something there to criticize.
I loved Ender’s Game, and think that that review is far more “pornographic” than the book. I pretty much disagree with every sentence of the review. That reviewer took one theme of a complex story, a theme he apparently didn’t like, and vulgarized it and ridiculed it to the point of absurdity.
Taken from that light, the morality in Ender’s Game is quite… questionable. But I’m not going to beat up my ten year old self for not seeing it at the time.
But hey, it’s not primarily nerd wish fulfillment, it’s a rationalist’s glowing aura of awesome. It’s winning in general, not winning despite being a nerd.
Harry’s aura of awesome is not only due to his being a rationalist. He also survived Voldemort’s attack, has a prophecy about him, and possesses “the killing spirit”—neither of which were caused by his rationality. Why not make him exceptionally strong and irresistibly handsome as well? Or something.
A lot of cognitive bias has tie-ins with “magical thinking”. If you’re living in a world where sympathetic magic works, why not the halo effect or gambler’s fallacy?
The “killing spirit” thing is being depicted as ambiguous at best rather than necessarily a good thing. Recall also that when Harry goes back and watches himself defend Nevile, he concludes that there’s something “very wrong with Harry Potter”
Oh, that’s a necessary part of the dream. Every badass nerd must feel a little romantic remorse after gruesomely defeating the enemies. Once again, see Ender’s Game, the perfect archetype of such fantasies.
Fair enough, except in the rememberall incident, it was made clear that alternate solutions were available. Harry screwed up, tried to solve the problem the wrong way, went for the spectacular spectacle rather than being willing to lose as a delaying tactic, as a way to stop the situation from going kablewey.
Perhaps the lesson here is that an attitude of winning at all costs is something that can lead someone to seek out real rationality, (as in ‘something to protect’) but is a bias and a handicap when you apply it to subproblems without keeping your sub-solutions within the proper scope.
I do enjoy this particular brand of wish fulfillment :-)
I suspect that’s the primary determinant of whether you like this story or not: whether you identify with the protagonist, or find him annoying. I wonder if non-geeks are more likely to fall into the latter camp?
Me, I’m in the former camp. Write a story about a geek kicking enough ass with enough style, and you’ll have me for a satisfied reader; and this one definitely qualifies.
Write a story about a geek kicking enough ass with enough style, and you’ll have me for a satisfied reader; and this one definitely qualifies.
May I recommend The Brothers’ War by Jeff Grubb? It’s one of those things that is better than it has any right to be. (You don’t have to play Magic to understand the story, but recognizing the references to some of the cards is part of the fun.)
The original Harry Potter was really just a clever re-imagining of standard fantasy tropes, so as long as you’ve had some sort of passing familiarity with fantasy you’ll have no trouble following along. There are all kinds of geeky references thrown in that you might even be better off than someone who has read the books but never passed a science course.
Yes, you would have trouble although if you are passingly familiar with the first two movies that would be enough.
Note that Eliezer also includes references to a lot of other fictional work, although generally in passing. So if one hasn’t read a lot of fantasy one might simply either not get the joke or not even noticing them.
I haven’t read the original books (I think I did see the first film once, but don’t remember much from it), and so far have had no trouble following the story and appreciating its considerable wit and charm. I furthermore hope Eliezer takes note of this, because I fear he may have unnecessarily introduced spoilers into some of the author’s notes.
Is someone who has never read any of the Harry Potter books and is not a fan of the movies likely to appreciate this work? I’m somewhat curious to read it but suspect I’d have trouble following the references.
I probably need to write up a “For those who have never seen the books” summary page of years 1-7, containing all the information that will be needed mixed with enough other information that it looks like a summary instead of “here is exactly and only what you will need to know”.
That sounds helpful, even to those who’ve read the books but many of them long ago. Just don’t let it stop you from writing chapters.
ETA: Outsource?
Outsource would be desirable.
Wikipedia probably has some decent plot summaries of the novels.
I never read any of the original Harry Potter books but found the fanfic quite enjoyable overall. At least one big plot point utterly confused me until I looked up “Quirrell” and “horcrux”. Also Eliezer chose to make Harry a badass a la Ender Wiggin, which I thought was in very poor taste, but I guess most people can just ignore this.
Don’t worry, he’s made up for it by making his villain much more badass than in the books.
I’m not complaining about story balance. I just don’t enjoy this particular brand of wish fulfillment—fantasizing about a nerd that could stare down five big bullies and still stay a nerd.
I wonder if Eliezer has or should read this review of Ender’s Game (a book I never read myself, but the reviewer seems to provide a useful warning to authors).
Ouch! I—I actually really enjoyed Ender’s Game. But I have to admit there’s a lot of truth in that review.
Now I feel vaguely guilty...
There’s a pretty obvious defense; even if it is just pornography that appeals to a different emotion, it’s still damn good pornography!
Or the ever popular “there’s something wrong with pornography?”
You feel guilty about using porn? How did you send us a message from the mysterious 20th century?
Yeah, I was wondering when this link would come up. Not sure about Eliezer, but I read this review sometime ago and it matched my impressions of the book perfectly.
Me too, though I had many of those same misgivings while reading the book. The difference between me and everybody else in my peer group—who loved Ender’s Game—is that I first read it as an adult, and they all read it first as teenagers or before.
To gather some actual data, I’m curious how many people there are here who first read it as a young teenager and didn’t love it, or first read it as an adult and did love it.
I read it as a teenager and didn’t love it. Many things annoyed me, but most of all the insanity of training Ender and company exclusively in skills other than the ones they would actually use (people floating in space with hand-held lasers) rather than the skills they needed. Also the absence of anything that looked AT ALL like a bell curve distribution of ability. The battle school kids are all supposed to be massively well selected and trained, yet only Ender, Bean, Valentine and Peter really matter. The battle school kids in general are all an absurd backdrop just to train “the one” who has been identified ahead of time. Finally, overly complex plans working annoyed me a bit and extreme military/governmental competence annoyed me more.
True Names and other Dangers is a weird case of an anarcho-libertarian writing a story showing extreme military/governmental competence.
Probably a stored rant here, but the thing that put me off most from Ender’s Game (which I’d read as an adult) was that the adults con a child into pushing the button which wipes out an alien race, and with the intent of absolving themselves from responsibility. IIRC, Ender actually does accept (partial?) responsibility in a later book.
Even though I’ve become more cynical since I read that book, I still think the adult behavior was well outside the human range. The normal thing is to blame the aliens for humans thinking it made sense to wipe them out.
I think its trickier than that—the adults are portrayed as being incapable of the “necessary” brilliance and/or ruthlessness. They put Ender in the hotseat because they hope he’ll do “something to win” without really visualizing what that something might entail. He’s simultaneously their “more powerful optimizing process” and (using LW terminology that makes me a little uncomfortable) their shabbos goy.
Its possible that the first two books were written specifically to explore the structure of moral reasoning in situations like this. How do people morally process a genocide that no specific person directly and obviously intended, especially if their theory of moral reasoning hinges primarily on intent?
I don’t mean to pull a Godwin, but there may (intentionally?) be a strong set of correspondences between Ender and Hitler, with a literary goal of getting people to “identify and forgive Hitler”—that is, the whole book may be a literary “Godwin prank”. I should note that this is not my original analysis, in part because I know almost nothing about “Hitler scholarship”. The original insight came from Elaine Radford, I heard about it via a K5 post by a friend of hers telling the story of how Orson Scott Card freaked out and tried to bully her into not publishing the analysis after book two but before book three (which was massively delayed, possibly because of the review if you buy the K5 story). The analysis was later cited in Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality.
For reference, I read Ender’s Game and really liked it when I was about 12. After my brother and I read it we tried to get our mom to read it and she stopped like 20 pages in because the horrific child abuse turned her stomach.
I stopped reading Card in my 40s or thereabouts because, while I was fascinated by the character torture, I became uncomfortable with my fascination. I’d earlier realized that there’s something really creepy about a lot of the older male characters in Card—they do horrific things which are justified in the text.
Discovering that you can no longer stand a book you used to love is sometimes called “the book was visited by the suck fairy”.
More recently, (on the strong recommendation of a friend) I read Empire, and amazingly, it has a positive father/son relationship.
“Also the absence of anything that looked AT ALL like a bell curve distribution of ability. The battle school kids are all supposed to be massively well selected and trained, yet only Ender, Bean, Valentine and Peter really matter. ”
If you select out the right end of the bell curve from the general population, then you won’t have a bell curve anymore, but rather a fat lower end.
Also, the training was supposed to be a sort of abstract sport to select for leadership skill, coolness under pressure, etc—it wasn’t supposed to be actually training them to fight in space. They did training of the actual spaceshippy stuff later. You could certainly argue they should have started that earlier though.
And to give them experience thinking about tactics three-dimensionally.
You should have something that looks like the right end of a bell curve, e.g. very little variation, especially with feedback loops from ability shaping environment shaping ability cut short by the tight external control on environment.
“The playing fields of Eton.”
But since the final application was video games, why not train under that form of pressure? There is plausibly something to be said for physical activity and proximity to teammates and opponents for building teamwork and leadership.
I read it in middle school, and, though I know there’s a tendency to see my earlier self as having the benefit of hindsight, I swear that while I really enjoyed the cathartic nerd-violence, I also had an awareness that there was something creepy and wrong with the whole thing, even if I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was both attracted to and horrified by the book. I had a faint sense that feeling that self-righteous is a very dangerous sign.
I then largely forgot about it (it seems to have strongly influenced a lot of people who read it at that age, but not me) until I reached adulthood and stumbled on criticism from Kessel and Radford, whereupon it all fell into place and I congratulated myself on having seen that there was at least something there to criticize.
Read it as an adult (sometime in the second half of my 20s) and loved it. (Still do.)
I loved Ender’s Game, and think that that review is far more “pornographic” than the book. I pretty much disagree with every sentence of the review. That reviewer took one theme of a complex story, a theme he apparently didn’t like, and vulgarized it and ridiculed it to the point of absurdity.
It’s this review that gets to me more: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
Taken from that light, the morality in Ender’s Game is quite… questionable. But I’m not going to beat up my ten year old self for not seeing it at the time.
I’m not sure what the relevance is here.
But hey, it’s not primarily nerd wish fulfillment, it’s a rationalist’s glowing aura of awesome. It’s winning in general, not winning despite being a nerd.
Harry’s aura of awesome is not only due to his being a rationalist. He also survived Voldemort’s attack, has a prophecy about him, and possesses “the killing spirit”—neither of which were caused by his rationality. Why not make him exceptionally strong and irresistibly handsome as well? Or something.
In Magical Britain, the halo effect actually works.
That sounds like it would work much better as a series of “In Magical Britain” jokes.
In Normal Britain, fundamental attribution is an error. In Magical Britain, all error can be attributed to someone’s fundament!!
In Magical Britain, fundament attributes you!
A lot of cognitive bias has tie-ins with “magical thinking”. If you’re living in a world where sympathetic magic works, why not the halo effect or gambler’s fallacy?
The “killing spirit” thing is being depicted as ambiguous at best rather than necessarily a good thing. Recall also that when Harry goes back and watches himself defend Nevile, he concludes that there’s something “very wrong with Harry Potter”
Oh, that’s a necessary part of the dream. Every badass nerd must feel a little romantic remorse after gruesomely defeating the enemies. Once again, see Ender’s Game, the perfect archetype of such fantasies.
Fair enough, except in the rememberall incident, it was made clear that alternate solutions were available. Harry screwed up, tried to solve the problem the wrong way, went for the spectacular spectacle rather than being willing to lose as a delaying tactic, as a way to stop the situation from going kablewey.
Perhaps the lesson here is that an attitude of winning at all costs is something that can lead someone to seek out real rationality, (as in ‘something to protect’) but is a bias and a handicap when you apply it to subproblems without keeping your sub-solutions within the proper scope.
I do enjoy this particular brand of wish fulfillment :-)
I suspect that’s the primary determinant of whether you like this story or not: whether you identify with the protagonist, or find him annoying. I wonder if non-geeks are more likely to fall into the latter camp?
Me, I’m in the former camp. Write a story about a geek kicking enough ass with enough style, and you’ll have me for a satisfied reader; and this one definitely qualifies.
May I recommend The Brothers’ War by Jeff Grubb? It’s one of those things that is better than it has any right to be. (You don’t have to play Magic to understand the story, but recognizing the references to some of the cards is part of the fun.)
Oh yeah, I read that, back when I was getting into Magic. Definitely good, plus having more back story to the game is also fun.
Another recommendation that I think a lot of people here would enjoy: the Wiz series by Rick Cook.
Wait, there’s a villain? Where?
Good point. IIRC, the only irredeemably villainous act committed on-screen in 26 chapters was squishing a bug.
The original Harry Potter was really just a clever re-imagining of standard fantasy tropes, so as long as you’ve had some sort of passing familiarity with fantasy you’ll have no trouble following along. There are all kinds of geeky references thrown in that you might even be better off than someone who has read the books but never passed a science course.
You’ll probably manage, but there’s a lot of stuff that won’t be as interesting/amusing/”ooooh hey there” if you don’t know the original.
Yes, you would have trouble although if you are passingly familiar with the first two movies that would be enough.
Note that Eliezer also includes references to a lot of other fictional work, although generally in passing. So if one hasn’t read a lot of fantasy one might simply either not get the joke or not even noticing them.
TV Tropes claims that I have “a few” Shout Outs. You’d think TV Tropes would do better than this.
We just don’t want to list them all. ;)
I haven’t read the original books (I think I did see the first film once, but don’t remember much from it), and so far have had no trouble following the story and appreciating its considerable wit and charm. I furthermore hope Eliezer takes note of this, because I fear he may have unnecessarily introduced spoilers into some of the author’s notes.