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0·13 days ago🎶 we didn’t start the fire 🎶
It reads like the overwrought, misaimed, indulgent clunkiness that I produced around age 15. Except slimier. At least what I wrote at age 15 had science is awesome! at its core, rather than science is broken, follow my methods to become
ClearRational instead.
And here’s a relevant Reddit thread about how HPMoR was even worse when first posted.
All the doves are dead, Dave.
We lined up by body count.
People using this term to mean their number of sexual partners will never not be funny to me. Not always in the same way, but it’s always funny in some fashion.
“And what would you say is your body count, Will?”
“I thought new couples were supposed to rise above that kind of contest, Dr. Lecter.”
After all, it was a workplace where many employees lived together, and had multiple overlapping romantic relationships with their colleagues, while also essentially acting as each other’s therapists
“After all, it was completely fucked”
Heavy is the head that wears the Spirit Halloween golden trilby.
“…meet it is I set it down, That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” —some guy
neither left wing nor right wing but some secret third thing (batshit right wing)
Me, catching up with the edits: wow that escalated quickly
The video maker says that he doesn’t “want to have to censor my slurs for YouTube.”
There is a 2 hour 39 minute twitter video about how he was supposedly wronged,
The existence of a twitter video longer than Citizen Kane or 2001: A Space Odyssey as a thing in the universe means that we are all, in some percentage, wronged.
“Slot machine” is a good comparison for chatbot text extruders, but as an insult against ActBlue it misfires horribly.
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.
I have an ATProto login and am skimming the threads before I have to go and do other stuff for a few hours. I came across a link to this podcast, which looks interesting. The transcript of the first episode (I’m more of a reader than a listener) barely gets going before (content warning for sexual assault by intoxication) this: