The same chapter has another instance of trademark bad Yud writing: “gom jabbar” is a torture spell that Draco applies to Hariezer’s hand. Few things kill tension faster and yeet the reader out of the story with greater force than a superfluous Nerd Culture™ reference. And the very next chapter has the smegheaded Death Note bit. It’s Ready Player One for cult inductees.
It was observed ages ago that Yud completely whiffed Mendelian genetics. Here’s the explanation in the su3su2u1 review, to refresh:
The other model Hariezer lays out is that magic lies on a single recessive gene. He reasons squibs have one dominant, non-magical version, and one recessive magical version of the gene. So of kids born to squibs, 1/4 will be wizards. In this version, you either have magic or you don’t, so if wizards married the non-magical, wizards themselves could become more rare, but the power of wizards won’t be diluted. […] Squibs are, by definition, the non-wizard children of wizard parents. Hariezer’s model 2 predicts that squibs cannot exist. It is already empirically disproven.
Hariezer, of course, does not notice this massive problem with his favored model, and Draco’s collected genealogy suggests about 6 out of 28 squib born children were wizards, so he declares model 2 wins the test.
Which goes to show that you shouldn’t try to learn science from HPMOR: the facts are bad, and the reasoning is bad. It doesn’t matter pedagogically whether it’s the author’s mistake or the character’s. And, really, having an 11-year-old boy who has done nothing but read books be the conduit for explanations of science is just a bad structural choice, for the same reason that you don’t see textbooks with unreliable narrators.
Yud is still throwing words at this:
the genetically literate mind informed by canon will now inquire how two Wizard phenotypes ever yield a Squib phenotype when Wizards are Magical-Magical homozygous.
Ooh, do tell.
The answer is not fully given in HPMOR proper
Ooh, do fuck off. You don’t get points for the story you didn’t write. And adding lore after the fact doesn’t change that your characters made the wrong decision from the information they had available at the time.
There is not a Magical gene complex that creates magic, but a Mundanity gene complex that suppresses it. After all, from pure physics we can never get to magic, but in an innately magical universe somebody could cast a spell to create the local appearance of mostly physics.
This is weird and arbitrary. Plenty of science-fiction stories have magic (or that which is effectively magic) operating by unknown-to-us physics. For example, the Laundry Files books are full of sigils and geases and summonings, and they explicitly say that the physicists are right, in the domain they’ve studied.
Similarly if all beings start out mundane then no gene complex can possibly create magic in them, but if all beings start out magical some gene complex could suppress their magic. Squibs and ultimately Muggleborns then arise naturally from a population of Muggle phenotypes as mutations damage the Mundanity gene complex, and in turn Wizard phenotypes sometimes yield Squibs as the Mundanity gene complex sometimes repairs itself by chromosomal crossover, with the phenomenon being more commonly observed in wizarding families with recent Muggle ancestry, to the alarm of genetics-illiterate purebloods.
From the Mendelian pattern implying the Mundanity gene complex is all on one chromosome, the gene complex can be inferred to be artificial in nature.
For Yudkowsky, operons must be evidence of Intelligent Design.
their ancestors were optimized in the shtetl
And now there are 59 comments, too.
Mnemonic tits… on the blockchain!
Is she his erotica co-author? Last I heard, the best guess for his collaborator on Project Lawful was Kelsey Piper.
Horny slop text fed into a second machine to make horny slop pictures. Surely this will solve the problem of learning molecular biology.
What stuck with me was Anima. My goodness, how variable it is, and how much it changes the linework and composition just based on which artist names you add to the prompt. Beautiful. Does it generate an extra finger here and there? Perhaps. Does it mess up character color or prop shape? Yes, it happens. But it’s a fair price for just how much effortless variability you get on a style level with a single pipeline. All of the gene images you see in this post were produced by a local anima-preview on my laptop without any style prompt changes except for the artist names.
The images: interchangeable, forgettable. All of them so crammed full of shit that every ostensibly noteworthy particular is drowned out.
Welcome to the abyss. It sucks here.
Every time I learn a new thing about Project Lawful, I am grateful that the glowfic format is so unfriendly and the prose so wretched that I caromed off within about a page.
I’ve never been to such an event, let alone tried to organize one, but I’ve socially known various people who’ve done them (kink but not CNC, to my knowledge) and a few sex workers who did kink professionally, and my guess is that alcohol just would not be allowed. You don’t do Jägerbombs before trying a climbing wall, and you don’t bring a substance that impairs judgment and worsens coordination to your sex party, for goodness’ sake.
Snacks were set out on a stovetop.
Incompetence kink
If you’re not willing to educate yourself about the candidates, fuck you voting in a primary for, man
When I was a PhD student, I had successfully published papers in journals.
It’s impressive how he manages to misread the characters of Dr. Manhattan, Han Solo and Sherlock Holmes.
A general reminder that this is sneer club, not debate club or snipe-at-one-another club. I am reluctant to lock this entire thread as it still seems possible that interesting and/or funny things will be said about it, but that reluctance will evaporate if people do not behave themselves. Play nice, assume that other awful.systems users are not fools, go play a round of GORILLAS.BAS, and tempt not the banhammer.
Epistemic status: it’s aphids, man, aphids everywhere. I asked ChatGPT. They’re aphids. They’re in my hair, on my skin, in my lungs. And the pain, Barris, it’s unreasonable. They’re all over the place. Oh, they’ve completely gotten Millie too.
In knavin’
Habryka quoting Yud:
From my perspective, my whole life has been, when you raise the banner to oppose the apocalypse, crazy people gather around making things worse
“Crazy people”? That’s hardly a nice way to describe your biggest fans.
“Slot machine” is a good comparison for chatbot text extruders, but as an insult against ActBlue it misfires horribly.