Discussion
Hence I am only slightly surprised that E. Z. Yudkowsky felt that Harry Potter was an ideal vessel into which he could pour his own ideas. There's a lengthy tradition of philosophical writers employing fictive frameworks in which they can present (for example) dialogues between characters intended to elaborate philosophical ideas in a speculative manner.
(cont'd)
When Nietzsche wanted to pass along the news that maybe God was dead, he wrote a fable about a madman with a lantern, going around looking for evidence of God, peering into everyone's faces because surely if God were to be found somewhere it'd be in human belief. Did anyone around Nietzsche still believe in God? His fable, a very small part of The Gay Science, suggests that all such belief had died out of the world, at least the European world.
(cont'd)
That way Nietzsche could feasibly claim that he himself wasn't saying "God is Dead!" even though, of course, that's how every carping #Christian fanatic interpreted Nietzsche's fable. They do that with everything: Christian fanatics of that sort have erased all subtle distinctions among different sorts of writing from their understanding. All texts are "literal" to them (i.e. they're physical objects that can be used to hurt people with.)
(cont'd)
Hence Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic isn't necessarily a bad idea but I know from attempting to interact with Yudkowsky on Twitter and with the #LessWrong people on their insular forum that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a person with very few ideas and very little inclination to defend them through logical disputation.
To quote Videodrome, the monologue is Yudkowsky's preferred mode of discourse.
(cont'd)
Hence the fundamental premise of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is, I suggest, in bad faith: Yudkowsky wants to present the appearance of logical disputation and dialectical materialism (by writing fiction about it) without any actual willingness to risk his ideas in debate.
#Debate therefore has become a doublethinkful, deceitful word in contemporary parlance.
(cont'd)
The #tech sector and the elite #programming and #computing culture are boiling over with nerdbros who babble about "debate" and "logic" and "rationality" while--exactly like E. Z. Yudkowsky--preferring the monologue as their method of discourse. They're isolated, insular, frankly very lonely people who out of psychological necessity have convinced themselves that they ought to be able to reason out the nature of reality without leaving their computer desk.
(cont'd)
There's scarcely any genuine debate among these right-wing nerds because they've a priori ruled out most of accepted and collectively decided human knowledge as "woke" and corrupted by Marxism and so forth. Their fanatical anticommunism has eaten away at their intellects to the point that they're now coming up with half-assed reinventions of existing fields and concepts, because they refuse to engage with the larger intellectual community.
(more)
I'm sure that if I looked up Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality on #YouTube I'd find dozens, hundreds, maybe THOUSANDS of well-argued refutations of Yudkowsky's ideology as explicated in his #HarryPotter fanfic. But there'd be ever so much more sycophantic praise and lengthy orations about Yudkowsky's genius, because sentimental hogwash is the element in which "conservatives" swim.
(cont'd)
I can't overstress the degree to which the habitual discourse of the "intellectuals" favored by #tech sector geeklords, in spite of all the "rationalism" or because of it, is strictly a matter of strong emotions.
They don't write out logical syllogisms. They write soppy eulogies about how logic and Science™ are amazing and the answer to all life's problems, seasoned with various festering hatreds.
(cont'd)
Hence I very much doubt that Yudkowsky's writing contains much "rationality". It's really the title that matters, and the fact that its author is now a tech-sector cult leader in the #effectivealtruism mode (i.e. designed towards grovelling and toadying to tech executives, the only people who actually think that "effective altruism" is worthy of study and lavish donations of money.)
(etc.)
I bet you that most of the hardcore fanbase of Yudkowsky and #LessWrong sophistry hasn't even read the fucking thing. If I may Godwin myself: that was also the case with Mein Kampf, which I've read bits of. It's trash, semi-coherent ranting mixed with grandiosity about building a great empire, and William L. Shirer (who was literally in Berlin when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939) said that most Germans he encountered, even if they were loyal to the regime, admitted they'd never read Hitler's book. It just sucked too bad.
(cont'd)
@mxchara IME quite a lot of the rationalists have read HPMOR! they are WHAT FUCKING HOUSE ARE YOU people
(every one of them is ravenclaw or slytherin. i wonder why that keeps happening.)
what they *haven't* read is The Sequences, the million words where Yudkowsky painstakingly set out the tenets of Rationality
i know these better than they do lol
they prefer vibes to study, and HPMOR is made of vibes for them to marinate in
@davidgerard @mxchara I liked HPMOR 😔
Please, give me something with more substance to read. 🙏
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