Some people seem to think that it is more than just a decent read: that it genre-breaking, that it transcends the rules of ordinary fiction. Some people change their life-pattern after reading HPMoR. Why?
For some context on who is asking this question: I’ve read 400 pages or more of HPMoR; as well as pretty much everything else that Eliezer has written.
I can’t speak for others, but I love HPMoR. I honestly believe it’s one of the best pieces of fiction I’ve ever read, so I’ll try to describe my own reasons.
Tropes and Plot Devices: I’ve read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy and HPMoR avoids a lot of the downfalls of the genre such as dei ex machina, whiny/angsty heroes, and phleboninum/unobtainium. Eliezer is familiar enough with common tropes that he does a great job of applying them in the right contexts, subverting them interestingly, and sometimes calling them out and making fun of them directly.
The First Law of Rationalist Fiction: Roughly, that characters should succeed by thinking in understandable, imitable ways, not by inexplicable powers or opaque “bursts of insight” that don’t really explain anything. After hearing this ideal stated outright and seeing it in practice, a lot of other fiction I’ve read (and, unfortunately, written) seems a lot less satisfying. Eliezer does a fantastic job at giving a look into the characters’ minds and letting you follow their thought patterns. This makes it even more satisfying when they succeed and even more crushing when they fail.
Application of the Sequences: As someone who had read the sequences more than once before reading HPMoR, it was both fun and enlightening to see the ideas put into practice in a high-stakes scenario. As someone who was familiar with the ideas beforehand, I got to smile and “get the reference,” yet also be surprised by the application. I honestly believe that I’ve started applying rationality to my real life more after reading MOR and seeing examples of how to do it.
Balance of Power: I think MOR does an excellent job of maintaining a balance of power between the characters. At times, you think your protagonist is horribly weak and at other times, they appear very strong, though perhaps in a different way from the other characters. The conflict is never one-sided.
The Characters: The characters are dynamic, multi-faceted, and sometimes morally ambiguous. You never fully understand their goals or motives, but they are there and they are consistent. Even the “dark” characters have certain insights to share that sound “bad”, but are nonetheless seductive and often hard to argue with.
The World and the Lore: As a long-time Harry Potter fan, seeing this kind of adaptation of the world is just fun. It’s a rich world in which to set a story and Eliezer does a great job expanding the lore, making some of it grittier, and making a lot of it much deeper and more mysterious. While he had a great platform to start from, the world-building is fantastic.
Overall, the story is incredibly entertaining and fun to read. It has a lot more to offer than most fiction out there. I love it.
I’m also somewhat confused by this. I love HPMoR and actively recommend it to friends, but to the extent Eliezer’s April Fools’ confession can be taken literally, characterizing it as “you-don’t-have-a-word genre” and coming from “an entirely different literary tradition” seems a stretch.
Some hypotheses:
Baseline expectations for Harry Potter fanfic are so low that when it turns out well, it seems much more stunning than it does relative to a broader reference class of fiction.
Didactic fiction is nothing new, but high quality didactic fiction is an incredibly impressive accomplishment.
The scientific content happens to align incredibly well with some readers’ interests, making it genre-breaking in the same way The Hunt for Red October was for technical details of submarines. If you are into that specific field, it feels world-shatteringly good. For puns about hydras and ordinals, HPMoR is the only game in town, but that’s ultimately a sparse audience.
There is a genuine gap in fiction that is both light-hearted and serious in places which Eliezer managed to fill. Pratchett is funny and can make great satirical points, but doesn’t have the same dramatic tension. Works that otherwise get the dramatic stakes right tend to steer clear of being light-hearted and inspirational. HPMoR is genre-breaking for roughly the same reasons Adventure Time gets the same accolades.
HPMoR is a new genre where every major character either has no character flaws or is capable of rapid growth. In other words, the diametric opposite of Hamlet, Anna Karenina, or The Corrections. Rather than “rationalist fiction”, a better term would be “paragon fiction”. Characters have rich and conflicting motives so life isn’t a walk in the park despite their strengths. Still everyone acts completely unrealistically relative to life-as-we-know-it by never doing something dumb or against their interests. Virtues aren’t merely labels and obstacles don’t automatically dissolve, so readers could learn to emulate these paragons through observation.
This actually does seem at odds with the western canon, and off-hand I can’t think of anything else that might be described in this way. Perhaps something like Hikaru No Go? Though I haven’t read them, maybe Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi or Ian Banks’ Culture series?
The Culture books tend to star people on the margins of the eponymous Culture: disaffected citizens, spies, mercenaries, people from other involved (and usually more conservative) civilizations. They almost always have serious character flaws (a number of them are out-and-out assholes) and while character development does occur, generally toward Culture values, it’s not usually dramatic. On the other hand, the culture itself, and the AI entities that run it, are presented as having few to no flaws from the narrative’s perspective. While the characters are often critical of it, it’s fairly clear where the author’s sympathies lie.
They’re not rationalist fiction in the sense that Methods is, or even in the sense that Asimov’s Foundation books are. They do make for a decent stab at eutopia from a socially liberal soft-transhumanist perspective, though not an especially radical one.
Hmm… Atlas Shrugged does have (ostensible) paragons. Rand’s idea of Romanticism as portraying “the world as it should be” seems to match up: “What Romantic art offers is not moral rules, not an explicit didactic message, but the image of a moral person—i.e., the concretized abstraction of a moral ideal.” (source) Rand’s antagonists do tend to be all flaws and no virtues though.
Characters act against their own interests in HPMoR… and in Hikaru no Go, for that matter. Just, you get to see why they’re doing it so it seems more reasonable at the time. Which is of course how it seems to them. We’re just used to characters doing things that don’t seem like good ideas at the time in other works.
HPMoR is a new genre where every major character either has no character flaws or is capable of rapid growth.
I have not read HPMoR (or have a particularly strong desire to), but if this sentence is true, then HPMoR is shitty literature with a particular TVTropes name.
It’s one of the only fictional works I can read without having to constantly ignore obvious things the protagonists should be doing. It’s really, really funny.
It’s fun and absurd and complicated and fulfills the inner need to overanalyze that a lot of geeky people like myself have. Me and a bunch of friends in college were reading it as it came out and speculating wildly on what would happen next, especially about motives, and especially around Azkaban. But it was just a popular fanfic with an absurd hilarious premise that we liked (and that would occasionally lead to me oversleeping and missing the first half hour of my astrobiology class). Another work of comparable interest that had quite a similar effect on several of my friends around the same time was Homestuck.
Nowdays we have nearly completely lost interest. Partially because we have learned of the existence of people who take it too seriously / have changed their life-pattern after reading it which adds an ugh effect and partially because it’s become rather overdone / takes itself too seriously. My interest in it that remains has changed from fun to morbid fascination.
Really? Are you sure it’s not simply that it’s barely updating anymore? I ask because the first two reasons you give are pretty poor reasons, and the second two… well, most of these developments seem to follow pretty directly from what went before.
I can’t speak for everybody, but some of us are judging it by comparison to other fanfiction instead of other fiction generally. I’d agree that HPMoR doesn’t stack up against good Sanderson or Pratchettt, say, but judged in the reference class of fanfiction it’s pretty extraordinary.
That it’s top-quality for its field (fanfic). That it has an active proselytising fanbase. That some of said fanbase, it’s the first thing they like that much that they’ve seen.
shrugs. I’m not that willing to deny people’s own preferences. It’s entirely possible that it’s the thing they’ll derive the most enjoyment from reading, or close.
One of the first things that I tell people is that it’s the most powerful story that I’ve ever read. I’ve never cried or laughed as hard as during HPMoR.
For some context: I got hooked on HPMoR because of its humor in the early chapters, and some then-mind-blowing characters, ideas and plot twists in the first half. That’s how I ended up on this forum way back when. However, the story has gotten darker, more preachy and short on comic relief in the last half. This is pretty standard for multi-volume works and is probably intentional, but I still miss Comed-tea, soul-eating Tracey and frolicking woodland creatures.
HPMoR is “more than just a decent read” because it is a well-designed and successfully implemented device to gently introduce new people to the ideas of rationality and transhumanism. In that it is similar to what Atlas Shrugged did for Objectivism. It also helps that the story has no obvious plot holes and idiot balls.
Some people change their life-pattern after reading HPMoR. Why?
Probably after lurking or participating here, not just after HPMoR.
I think that some MIRI researchers, or at least active community members, originally encountered the LW/MIRI memeplex through HPMoR.
Also, I met someone who said he was formerly very religious and is now an atheist. He said that he was brought into the LW world through HPMoR and HPMoR seemed to still be the main focus of his interests inside this memeplex. Though I can’t say that HPMoR was the only cause of his shift of attitudes or even the main one, it apparently had an important role..
So, it does seem that HPMoR has some strong effects on some people.
Yes, but some people praise the book itself as utterly exceptional. Atlas Shrugged may introduce people to Objectivism, but even the fanatics who praise the ideas in it don’t praise it as literature.
“Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel that has ever been written, in my judgment, so let’s let it go at that.” — Nathaniel Branden, quoted in a 1971 interview in Reason magazine.
In some respects, it is. If you’ve always been put off by idiot balls or stupid moves or leaving exploits on the table or any number of other things, HPMoR scratches an itch that you’ve had all along.
Certainly. I’m interested in why people would say either of these things. From my reading, HPMoR is interesting and well-written, but it’s hard to see why it would change someone’s life or why someone would think it was an utterly new mold-breaking work of literature.
As I am agreeing with your confusion I want to extend the question to why Eliezer’s writing is seen as so great in general. For me it is just exhausting to read, especially since most of the articles can be summarised in a couple of sentences.
I’d be happy to see you do this. Maybe when we see what you think the two sentence version of every article is it’ll be easy to talk about why you don’t like what eliezer is doing.
That would require me reading all of the articles. We could meet at a middle ground with me trying to rewrite one of the smaller subsequences, like a handful of articles, and us evaluating the merits of this approach. Do you have any preferences?
Thanks for those answers; but they don’t quite explain
why some people are induced to change their life by it (perhaps only because it piques their interest for other material on LessWrong)
why some readers get more enthusiastic about it than about some excellent non-fanfic books. (These readers are mostly not part of a group that might put social pressure on them to become fans.)
why Eliezer has described his own work as “fictional literature from what looks like an entirely different literary tradition.” (That’s in the April Fool’s post, but he has said similar things elsewhere. And though this bullet point could be explained as arrogance on the part of Eliezer, some comments I’ve seen suggest that many fans agree with him.)
why some people are induced to change their life by it (perhaps only because it piques their interest for other material on LessWrong)
I’m also kind of surprised by this but… actually how rare really is it for people to say “X caused me to change my life.”
I do know for a fact that people have changed their lives based on canon Harry Potter, with hundreds of people becoming obsessed with different character pairings etc. So maybe it isn’t too surprising that it would happen with HPMoR, at least to a few people.
A weird fact about humanity and mass society is that virtually anything that reaches a large enough audience will wind up with some obsessive fans. As an example, dozens of women pledged their undying devotion to Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker.”
why Eliezer has described his own work as “fictional literature from what looks like an entirely different literary tradition.”
Characters in HPMOR do things for rational reasons. Smart characters are smart and make their decisions based on careful thought instead of unexplained flashes of insight.
That not something that happens in normal fiction. If you think that’s not new, which works of fiction do you consider to have the same quality?
why some people are induced to change their life by it (perhaps only because it piques their interest for other material on LessWrong)
Because HPMOR often has morals to teach.
There are a lot of atheists who are essentially like Harry’s father. They wouldn’t run experiments to test whether magic exist but simply assume that it doesn’t exist and get angry with everyone who claims magic exists. By having a well written story they might update into the direction of empricism.
It teaches a version of science that about experiements and not about reading authoritative papers. That might raise in at least a few readers the question of why they aren’t doing science in their lifes.
The narrative about taking heroic responsiblity is strong. For me it was strong enough to make some decisions about taking responsibility that I otherwise might not have made.
To me HPMOR feels deeper than Pratchett. Pratchett makes a lot of points on the surface and plays around with them. HPMOR had a bunch of instances where Eliezer made point that weren’t obvious and buried deeper. Enough for most readers to not consciously get them, but that doesn’t prevent the reader from absorbing the moral a more unconscious level.
In hypnosis telling metaphars that take the brain months to understand is a teaching device for creative deep belief changes. HPMoR frequenlty makes point on that level. I would not have expected to find that in writing by someone like Eliezer and it made me update into thinking that Eliezer understands more than I previously thought. Eliezer doesn’t have a hypnosis background but learned his lessons about deep metaphor somewhere else. Probably by dealing with zen koan’s and how they are used for teaching.
If I had to guess, I’d guess that it targets a particular kind of audience that most fiction isn’t targeted at, and consequently appeals to that audience more than excellent other books targeted elsewhere.
Because most fiction (including fanfics) doesn’t include such explicit teachings that are applicable to one’s life. Usually it’s found in non-fiction, and didactic works of fiction usually must be subtle lest they be labeled “preachy”.
The themes in and lessons of HPMOR are relatively uncommon in fiction.
Didactic fiction is a rarity in modern times, and writings that are both didactic and tell a story well are rarer still.
Because most fiction (including fanfics) doesn’t include such explicit teachings that are applicable to one’s life. Usually it’s found in non-fiction, and didactic works of fiction usually must be subtle lest they be labeled “preachy”.
I just made the point on the /r/HPMOR subreddit that with most fiction, the author wants to share a story with you, but with some authors (for example, Yudkowsky or Stephenson), they have knowledge they want to share with you and their way of sharing is through story.
I’m sure their are other authors who also do this, but they seem to be few and far between, making HPMOR one of the first works of that kind people may encounter.
Also, most authors who do want to show or teach something through their story tend to do it subtly and non-explicitly, perhaps because being open and explicit about a message is low-status.
I thought about it before I typed it out and I found that most authors do want to show or teach something, but that this is often something obvious. Harry Potter (canon) teaches us that Nazis are bad, that you shouldn’t trust an oppressive government, that bureaucracies can be dangerous, that you shouldn’t torture people… but when I read the novels (at the appropriate age, I grew up with them) I had already learned those lessons.
What Anathem, Snow Crash and HPMOR taught me were things I wouldn’t have picked up on my own.
It’s interesting to note that HP canon is aimed at children/teens, and that books aimed at those demographics tend to be more open about teaching something. It would be interesting to consider how often fiction aimed at adults is didactic, and how open adult didactic fiction is about its message.
Didactic fiction is a rarity in modern times, and writings that are both didactic and tell a story well are rarer still.
I’m not so sure about this. Didactic and polemic works are uncommon (though not unknown) in genre fiction, but they seem less so in literary fiction; George Orwell is the first writer that comes to mind, but he’s by no means the last. I’ve even heard didactic content described as a prerequisite of literary quality, though I can’t remember where at the moment.
It’s been a while but why do you consider Orwell to be didactic. He makes political points but from what I remember from 1984 it’s not really about decisions are made in daily life.
A work doesn’t need to inform daily life in order to be didactic. 1984 is about the dynamics of totalitarianism, Animal Farm is a thinly fictionalized Russian Revolution, Down and Out in London and Paris is about class relations in Western Europe, and so forth—but practically everything Orwell wrote was primarily meant to be instructive in some way.
Maybe I have too precise a definition, but I think “didactic” should mean giving advice, and not just information. Almost all fiction is about psychological insight, but that isn’t directly practical. And I don’t mean “practical” in a daily life way: the reason I don’t count Animal Farm as didactic isn’t because I’m not a Bolshevik, but because even if I were, it still wouldn’t tell me how to change the course of the revolution.
By that definition nearly all serious fiction is didactic and there are plenty of people in the English department who find didactic elements in the rest.
blacktrance used didactic to mean “teachings that are applicable to one’s life”. I don’t think Orwell fits.
I wouldn’t say “nearly all”, but quite a lot of it, yes, and probably a larger fraction since 1945. That’s the point.
I don’t think we should restrict the word to everyday living, but if we did, I could point to Hermann Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Ayn Rand, and plenty of others.
My experience with HPMoR has been to find a story that is a) dementedly funny, b) loaded with a pile of mysteries to keep you wondering about crazy theories late at night, c) internally consistent and well narrated, d) useful for indirectly teaching people about rational techniques.
I was not aware of the number of rationalist novels circulating out there, and HPMoR was the first case I found of a fictional character explicitly defending my pet causes (empiricism, privileging experimentation, reductionism, atheism, the importance of SF in teaching creative thought). Among other effects, it naturally makes the reader want to know more about the author.
Very few books in any genre are as good at maintaining a constant and exciting level of interaction between interesting characters. Even some of the works that have HPJEV style characters like Miles Vorkosigan (who I love) tend to lean heavily on their central character. Harry Potter is extremely impportant to HPMOR but all his best scenes are interplays with draco, hermione and quirrel which involve back and forth interaction rather than simply domination.
What’s so special about HPMoR?
Some people seem to think that it is more than just a decent read: that it genre-breaking, that it transcends the rules of ordinary fiction. Some people change their life-pattern after reading HPMoR. Why?
For some context on who is asking this question: I’ve read 400 pages or more of HPMoR; as well as pretty much everything else that Eliezer has written.
I can’t speak for others, but I love HPMoR. I honestly believe it’s one of the best pieces of fiction I’ve ever read, so I’ll try to describe my own reasons.
Tropes and Plot Devices: I’ve read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy and HPMoR avoids a lot of the downfalls of the genre such as dei ex machina, whiny/angsty heroes, and phleboninum/unobtainium. Eliezer is familiar enough with common tropes that he does a great job of applying them in the right contexts, subverting them interestingly, and sometimes calling them out and making fun of them directly.
The First Law of Rationalist Fiction: Roughly, that characters should succeed by thinking in understandable, imitable ways, not by inexplicable powers or opaque “bursts of insight” that don’t really explain anything. After hearing this ideal stated outright and seeing it in practice, a lot of other fiction I’ve read (and, unfortunately, written) seems a lot less satisfying. Eliezer does a fantastic job at giving a look into the characters’ minds and letting you follow their thought patterns. This makes it even more satisfying when they succeed and even more crushing when they fail.
Application of the Sequences: As someone who had read the sequences more than once before reading HPMoR, it was both fun and enlightening to see the ideas put into practice in a high-stakes scenario. As someone who was familiar with the ideas beforehand, I got to smile and “get the reference,” yet also be surprised by the application. I honestly believe that I’ve started applying rationality to my real life more after reading MOR and seeing examples of how to do it.
Balance of Power: I think MOR does an excellent job of maintaining a balance of power between the characters. At times, you think your protagonist is horribly weak and at other times, they appear very strong, though perhaps in a different way from the other characters. The conflict is never one-sided.
The Characters: The characters are dynamic, multi-faceted, and sometimes morally ambiguous. You never fully understand their goals or motives, but they are there and they are consistent. Even the “dark” characters have certain insights to share that sound “bad”, but are nonetheless seductive and often hard to argue with.
The World and the Lore: As a long-time Harry Potter fan, seeing this kind of adaptation of the world is just fun. It’s a rich world in which to set a story and Eliezer does a great job expanding the lore, making some of it grittier, and making a lot of it much deeper and more mysterious. While he had a great platform to start from, the world-building is fantastic.
Overall, the story is incredibly entertaining and fun to read. It has a lot more to offer than most fiction out there. I love it.
I’m also somewhat confused by this. I love HPMoR and actively recommend it to friends, but to the extent Eliezer’s April Fools’ confession can be taken literally, characterizing it as “you-don’t-have-a-word genre” and coming from “an entirely different literary tradition” seems a stretch.
Some hypotheses:
Baseline expectations for Harry Potter fanfic are so low that when it turns out well, it seems much more stunning than it does relative to a broader reference class of fiction.
Didactic fiction is nothing new, but high quality didactic fiction is an incredibly impressive accomplishment.
The scientific content happens to align incredibly well with some readers’ interests, making it genre-breaking in the same way The Hunt for Red October was for technical details of submarines. If you are into that specific field, it feels world-shatteringly good. For puns about hydras and ordinals, HPMoR is the only game in town, but that’s ultimately a sparse audience.
There is a genuine gap in fiction that is both light-hearted and serious in places which Eliezer managed to fill. Pratchett is funny and can make great satirical points, but doesn’t have the same dramatic tension. Works that otherwise get the dramatic stakes right tend to steer clear of being light-hearted and inspirational. HPMoR is genre-breaking for roughly the same reasons Adventure Time gets the same accolades.
One more hypothesis after reading other comments:
HPMoR is a new genre where every major character either has no character flaws or is capable of rapid growth. In other words, the diametric opposite of Hamlet, Anna Karenina, or The Corrections. Rather than “rationalist fiction”, a better term would be “paragon fiction”. Characters have rich and conflicting motives so life isn’t a walk in the park despite their strengths. Still everyone acts completely unrealistically relative to life-as-we-know-it by never doing something dumb or against their interests. Virtues aren’t merely labels and obstacles don’t automatically dissolve, so readers could learn to emulate these paragons through observation.
This actually does seem at odds with the western canon, and off-hand I can’t think of anything else that might be described in this way. Perhaps something like Hikaru No Go? Though I haven’t read them, maybe Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi or Ian Banks’ Culture series?
The Culture books tend to star people on the margins of the eponymous Culture: disaffected citizens, spies, mercenaries, people from other involved (and usually more conservative) civilizations. They almost always have serious character flaws (a number of them are out-and-out assholes) and while character development does occur, generally toward Culture values, it’s not usually dramatic. On the other hand, the culture itself, and the AI entities that run it, are presented as having few to no flaws from the narrative’s perspective. While the characters are often critical of it, it’s fairly clear where the author’s sympathies lie.
They’re not rationalist fiction in the sense that Methods is, or even in the sense that Asimov’s Foundation books are. They do make for a decent stab at eutopia from a socially liberal soft-transhumanist perspective, though not an especially radical one.
Atlas Shrugged comes to mind.
Hmm… Atlas Shrugged does have (ostensible) paragons. Rand’s idea of Romanticism as portraying “the world as it should be” seems to match up: “What Romantic art offers is not moral rules, not an explicit didactic message, but the image of a moral person—i.e., the concretized abstraction of a moral ideal.” (source) Rand’s antagonists do tend to be all flaws and no virtues though.
Everyone in that book acts nearly completely diametrically opposed to their interests were they in the real world.
Characters act against their own interests in HPMoR… and in Hikaru no Go, for that matter. Just, you get to see why they’re doing it so it seems more reasonable at the time. Which is of course how it seems to them. We’re just used to characters doing things that don’t seem like good ideas at the time in other works.
I have not read HPMoR (or have a particularly strong desire to), but if this sentence is true, then HPMoR is shitty literature with a particular TVTropes name.
How many people over 35 enjoyed HPMoR?
It’s one of the only fictional works I can read without having to constantly ignore obvious things the protagonists should be doing. It’s really, really funny.
It’s fun and absurd and complicated and fulfills the inner need to overanalyze that a lot of geeky people like myself have. Me and a bunch of friends in college were reading it as it came out and speculating wildly on what would happen next, especially about motives, and especially around Azkaban. But it was just a popular fanfic with an absurd hilarious premise that we liked (and that would occasionally lead to me oversleeping and missing the first half hour of my astrobiology class). Another work of comparable interest that had quite a similar effect on several of my friends around the same time was Homestuck.
Nowdays we have nearly completely lost interest. Partially because we have learned of the existence of people who take it too seriously / have changed their life-pattern after reading it which adds an ugh effect and partially because it’s become rather overdone / takes itself too seriously. My interest in it that remains has changed from fun to morbid fascination.
Really? Are you sure it’s not simply that it’s barely updating anymore? I ask because the first two reasons you give are pretty poor reasons, and the second two… well, most of these developments seem to follow pretty directly from what went before.
I can’t speak for everybody, but some of us are judging it by comparison to other fanfiction instead of other fiction generally. I’d agree that HPMoR doesn’t stack up against good Sanderson or Pratchettt, say, but judged in the reference class of fanfiction it’s pretty extraordinary.
That it’s top-quality for its field (fanfic). That it has an active proselytising fanbase. That some of said fanbase, it’s the first thing they like that much that they’ve seen.
And, for some, the only thing.
Basically, kids who don’t know much about an area will imprint upon the first thing they like that much.
shrugs. I’m not that willing to deny people’s own preferences. It’s entirely possible that it’s the thing they’ll derive the most enjoyment from reading, or close.
One more thing—it’s got is tremendous emotional range and intensity.
One of the first things that I tell people is that it’s the most powerful story that I’ve ever read. I’ve never cried or laughed as hard as during HPMoR.
For some context: I got hooked on HPMoR because of its humor in the early chapters, and some then-mind-blowing characters, ideas and plot twists in the first half. That’s how I ended up on this forum way back when. However, the story has gotten darker, more preachy and short on comic relief in the last half. This is pretty standard for multi-volume works and is probably intentional, but I still miss Comed-tea, soul-eating Tracey and frolicking woodland creatures.
HPMoR is “more than just a decent read” because it is a well-designed and successfully implemented device to gently introduce new people to the ideas of rationality and transhumanism. In that it is similar to what Atlas Shrugged did for Objectivism. It also helps that the story has no obvious plot holes and idiot balls.
Probably after lurking or participating here, not just after HPMoR.
I wasn’t aware that people have been changing their “life-pattern” after reading it. Are there any examples?
I think that some MIRI researchers, or at least active community members, originally encountered the LW/MIRI memeplex through HPMoR.
Also, I met someone who said he was formerly very religious and is now an atheist. He said that he was brought into the LW world through HPMoR and HPMoR seemed to still be the main focus of his interests inside this memeplex. Though I can’t say that HPMoR was the only cause of his shift of attitudes or even the main one, it apparently had an important role..
So, it does seem that HPMoR has some strong effects on some people.
I think it’s main effect is as a gateway to studying rationality.
Yes, but some people praise the book itself as utterly exceptional. Atlas Shrugged may introduce people to Objectivism, but even the fanatics who praise the ideas in it don’t praise it as literature.
“Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel that has ever been written, in my judgment, so let’s let it go at that.”
— Nathaniel Branden, quoted in a 1971 interview in Reason magazine.
In some respects, it is. If you’ve always been put off by idiot balls or stupid moves or leaving exploits on the table or any number of other things, HPMoR scratches an itch that you’ve had all along.
I think those are two separate things—“it changed my life” and “It’s exceptional literature” are different, although they’re not uncorrelated.
Certainly. I’m interested in why people would say either of these things. From my reading, HPMoR is interesting and well-written, but it’s hard to see why it would change someone’s life or why someone would think it was an utterly new mold-breaking work of literature.
I think the main effect wrt the former is as a introduction to rationality and the Sequences
It is pretty good, and the plot picks up after Azkaban.
I don’t count myself among the rabid, but I do enjoy the mysteries. It’s very densely plotted, which is fun.
As I am agreeing with your confusion I want to extend the question to why Eliezer’s writing is seen as so great in general. For me it is just exhausting to read, especially since most of the articles can be summarised in a couple of sentences.
I’d be happy to see you do this. Maybe when we see what you think the two sentence version of every article is it’ll be easy to talk about why you don’t like what eliezer is doing.
That would require me reading all of the articles. We could meet at a middle ground with me trying to rewrite one of the smaller subsequences, like a handful of articles, and us evaluating the merits of this approach. Do you have any preferences?
Haven’t you already read them if you know that they can be summarized in two sentences?
Thanks for those answers; but they don’t quite explain
why some people are induced to change their life by it (perhaps only because it piques their interest for other material on LessWrong)
why some readers get more enthusiastic about it than about some excellent non-fanfic books. (These readers are mostly not part of a group that might put social pressure on them to become fans.)
why Eliezer has described his own work as “fictional literature from what looks like an entirely different literary tradition.” (That’s in the April Fool’s post, but he has said similar things elsewhere. And though this bullet point could be explained as arrogance on the part of Eliezer, some comments I’ve seen suggest that many fans agree with him.)
I’m also kind of surprised by this but… actually how rare really is it for people to say “X caused me to change my life.”
I do know for a fact that people have changed their lives based on canon Harry Potter, with hundreds of people becoming obsessed with different character pairings etc. So maybe it isn’t too surprising that it would happen with HPMoR, at least to a few people.
A weird fact about humanity and mass society is that virtually anything that reaches a large enough audience will wind up with some obsessive fans. As an example, dozens of women pledged their undying devotion to Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker.”
Characters in HPMOR do things for rational reasons. Smart characters are smart and make their decisions based on careful thought instead of unexplained flashes of insight.
That not something that happens in normal fiction. If you think that’s not new, which works of fiction do you consider to have the same quality?
Because HPMOR often has morals to teach.
There are a lot of atheists who are essentially like Harry’s father. They wouldn’t run experiments to test whether magic exist but simply assume that it doesn’t exist and get angry with everyone who claims magic exists. By having a well written story they might update into the direction of empricism.
It teaches a version of science that about experiements and not about reading authoritative papers. That might raise in at least a few readers the question of why they aren’t doing science in their lifes.
The narrative about taking heroic responsiblity is strong. For me it was strong enough to make some decisions about taking responsibility that I otherwise might not have made.
To me HPMOR feels deeper than Pratchett. Pratchett makes a lot of points on the surface and plays around with them. HPMOR had a bunch of instances where Eliezer made point that weren’t obvious and buried deeper. Enough for most readers to not consciously get them, but that doesn’t prevent the reader from absorbing the moral a more unconscious level.
In hypnosis telling metaphars that take the brain months to understand is a teaching device for creative deep belief changes. HPMoR frequenlty makes point on that level.
I would not have expected to find that in writing by someone like Eliezer and it made me update into thinking that Eliezer understands more than I previously thought. Eliezer doesn’t have a hypnosis background but learned his lessons about deep metaphor somewhere else. Probably by dealing with zen koan’s and how they are used for teaching.
If I had to guess, I’d guess that it targets a particular kind of audience that most fiction isn’t targeted at, and consequently appeals to that audience more than excellent other books targeted elsewhere.
Because most fiction (including fanfics) doesn’t include such explicit teachings that are applicable to one’s life. Usually it’s found in non-fiction, and didactic works of fiction usually must be subtle lest they be labeled “preachy”.
The themes in and lessons of HPMOR are relatively uncommon in fiction.
Didactic fiction is a rarity in modern times, and writings that are both didactic and tell a story well are rarer still.
I just made the point on the /r/HPMOR subreddit that with most fiction, the author wants to share a story with you, but with some authors (for example, Yudkowsky or Stephenson), they have knowledge they want to share with you and their way of sharing is through story.
I’m sure their are other authors who also do this, but they seem to be few and far between, making HPMOR one of the first works of that kind people may encounter.
Also, most authors who do want to show or teach something through their story tend to do it subtly and non-explicitly, perhaps because being open and explicit about a message is low-status.
I thought about it before I typed it out and I found that most authors do want to show or teach something, but that this is often something obvious. Harry Potter (canon) teaches us that Nazis are bad, that you shouldn’t trust an oppressive government, that bureaucracies can be dangerous, that you shouldn’t torture people… but when I read the novels (at the appropriate age, I grew up with them) I had already learned those lessons.
What Anathem, Snow Crash and HPMOR taught me were things I wouldn’t have picked up on my own.
It’s interesting to note that HP canon is aimed at children/teens, and that books aimed at those demographics tend to be more open about teaching something. It would be interesting to consider how often fiction aimed at adults is didactic, and how open adult didactic fiction is about its message.
I’m not so sure about this. Didactic and polemic works are uncommon (though not unknown) in genre fiction, but they seem less so in literary fiction; George Orwell is the first writer that comes to mind, but he’s by no means the last. I’ve even heard didactic content described as a prerequisite of literary quality, though I can’t remember where at the moment.
It’s been a while but why do you consider Orwell to be didactic. He makes political points but from what I remember from 1984 it’s not really about decisions are made in daily life.
A work doesn’t need to inform daily life in order to be didactic. 1984 is about the dynamics of totalitarianism, Animal Farm is a thinly fictionalized Russian Revolution, Down and Out in London and Paris is about class relations in Western Europe, and so forth—but practically everything Orwell wrote was primarily meant to be instructive in some way.
Maybe I have too precise a definition, but I think “didactic” should mean giving advice, and not just information. Almost all fiction is about psychological insight, but that isn’t directly practical. And I don’t mean “practical” in a daily life way: the reason I don’t count Animal Farm as didactic isn’t because I’m not a Bolshevik, but because even if I were, it still wouldn’t tell me how to change the course of the revolution.
By that definition nearly all serious fiction is didactic and there are plenty of people in the English department who find didactic elements in the rest.
blacktrance used didactic to mean “teachings that are applicable to one’s life”. I don’t think Orwell fits.
I wouldn’t say “nearly all”, but quite a lot of it, yes, and probably a larger fraction since 1945. That’s the point.
I don’t think we should restrict the word to everyday living, but if we did, I could point to Hermann Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Ayn Rand, and plenty of others.
My experience with HPMoR has been to find a story that is a) dementedly funny, b) loaded with a pile of mysteries to keep you wondering about crazy theories late at night, c) internally consistent and well narrated, d) useful for indirectly teaching people about rational techniques.
I was not aware of the number of rationalist novels circulating out there, and HPMoR was the first case I found of a fictional character explicitly defending my pet causes (empiricism, privileging experimentation, reductionism, atheism, the importance of SF in teaching creative thought). Among other effects, it naturally makes the reader want to know more about the author.
Very few books in any genre are as good at maintaining a constant and exciting level of interaction between interesting characters. Even some of the works that have HPJEV style characters like Miles Vorkosigan (who I love) tend to lean heavily on their central character. Harry Potter is extremely impportant to HPMOR but all his best scenes are interplays with draco, hermione and quirrel which involve back and forth interaction rather than simply domination.