I can sort of trust you that HPMOR is insanely cringe.
The private sentiment of folks who read through all of it would probably be some degree of ‘cringe’ too.
I couldn’t even make it halfway, though I am fascinated by imaginative fanfiction, as it becomes too much of a childish power fantasy to ignore and suspend my disbelief while reading.
Yeah, you’ve got a point there. And yet, HPMOR is popular. Lots of people love it, and got into the LW and the rat community that way. You yourself may not have, but that’s evidence in favour of high variance. So I remain unsure if something like HPMOR could work in China too. Why assume there’d be less variance in response there?
It’s about trade-offs. HPMOR/an equally cringey analogue will attract a certain sector of weird people into the community who can then be redirected towards A.I. stuff — but it will repel a majority of novices because it “taints” the A.I. stuff with cringiness by association.
This is a reasonable trade-off if:
the kind of weird people who’ll get into HPMOR are also the kind of weird people who’d be useful to A.I. safety;
the normies were already likely to dismiss the A.I. stuff with or without the added load of cringe.
In the West, 1. is true because there’s a strong association between techy people and niche fandom, so even though weird nerds are a minority, they might represent a substantial fraction of the people you want to reach. And 2. is kind of true for a related reason, which is that “nerds” are viewed as generally cringe even if they don’t specifically talk about HP fanfiction; it’s already assumed that someone who thinks about computers all days is probably the kind of cringe who’d be big into a semi-self-insert HP fanfiction.
But in China, from @Lao Mein’s testimony, 1. is definitely not true (a lot of the people we want to reach would be on Team “this sounds weird and cringe, I’m not touching it”) and 2. is possibly not true (if computer experts ≠ fandom nerds in Chinese popular consciousness, it may be easier to get broad audiences to listen to a non-nerdy computer expert talking about A.I.).
The private sentiment of folks who read through all of it would probably be some degree of ‘cringe’ too.
I couldn’t even make it halfway, though I am fascinated by imaginative fanfiction, as it becomes too much of a childish power fantasy to ignore and suspend my disbelief while reading.
Yeah, you’ve got a point there. And yet, HPMOR is popular. Lots of people love it, and got into the LW and the rat community that way. You yourself may not have, but that’s evidence in favour of high variance. So I remain unsure if something like HPMOR could work in China too. Why assume there’d be less variance in response there?
It’s about trade-offs. HPMOR/an equally cringey analogue will attract a certain sector of weird people into the community who can then be redirected towards A.I. stuff — but it will repel a majority of novices because it “taints” the A.I. stuff with cringiness by association.
This is a reasonable trade-off if:
the kind of weird people who’ll get into HPMOR are also the kind of weird people who’d be useful to A.I. safety;
the normies were already likely to dismiss the A.I. stuff with or without the added load of cringe.
In the West, 1. is true because there’s a strong association between techy people and niche fandom, so even though weird nerds are a minority, they might represent a substantial fraction of the people you want to reach. And 2. is kind of true for a related reason, which is that “nerds” are viewed as generally cringe even if they don’t specifically talk about HP fanfiction; it’s already assumed that someone who thinks about computers all days is probably the kind of cringe who’d be big into a semi-self-insert HP fanfiction.
But in China, from @Lao Mein’s testimony, 1. is definitely not true (a lot of the people we want to reach would be on Team “this sounds weird and cringe, I’m not touching it”) and 2. is possibly not true (if computer experts ≠ fandom nerds in Chinese popular consciousness, it may be easier to get broad audiences to listen to a non-nerdy computer expert talking about A.I.).
HPMOR is weird and attracts weird people.