Agreed. It started out rather insufferable, but had a good enough concept (somebody trying to figure out how magic actually works) an a good enough execution on that concept, that it was a very enjoyable read anyway. Recently, he's largely abandoned the "figure out how magic actually works" part in favor of the not terribly interesting plot and characters.
If you do not value rationality and believe in the primary of the truth, you will hate it. This is not an apolitical story, it is in many ways a manifesto.
I am very sure you could value rationality and still hate the writing. Terms like 'valuing rationality' or believing in the primacy of truth (I think that's what you meant) don't have universally accepted definitions.
A rational person might readily find the novel to an Eliezer Yudkowsky's propaganda-novel along the lines of an Ayn Rand novel, and not find it a well written or enjoyable story. The number of parallels between Rand and Yudkowsky are really fascinating to me, Rand and Yudkowsky really seem to be birds of a feather.
The converse of the original statement is that if you hate the writing, you don't value rationality and truth. You didn't state the converse, you seem to have taken it as a starting point and disproved it. But nobody was arguing the converse was true, which was my point.
You are right, I stated the alternate case of those who value rationality and truth as opposed to those who do not, rather than the converse. Sorry, I was being too loose with my language there.
As to what the other was arguing, I was chiming in, not posing a critique, so your point is peripheral. In discussions one is permitted to add thoughts that are related without it being some kind of intellectual sparring. If I were sparring I'd have debated the claim that those who don't value rationality and truth would dislike the book (which is a hard claim to justify), but that would have been a pointless exercise since I don't really care. I did care to point out that rational, truth-seeking people could find that the book was unbearable, since that was my experience and something I thought was worth noting. If you disagree, then please feel free to explain, I'd be interested to learn how rational people must agree that it was a well written piece of fan fiction.
I don't disagree. I just thought your comment, when taken as an individual statement, was obvious enough that it didn't need to be said (at least not again). I chose to interpret it as a refutation, which was my mistake.
It intuitively appeals to me that people in cults might not have the self-awareness to debate their own cultishness, but, then, I don't really know anyone in a cult. At one point I did meet a couple at a party who were involved in... something... that involved homeopathy and a spiritual leader. And they chuckled and said that they might be in a cult.
That said, having read most of LessWrong, my impression was that what is said there is mostly obvious in retrospect. Like, "Of course, how could I not see that?". My guess is, I already believed most of the sequences before I even read them.
When a community matches my own world view so closely, I just can't feel any cult, and I tend to assume there is none.
> That said, having read most of LessWrong, my impression was that what is said there is mostly obvious in retrospect. Like, "Of course, how could I not see that?". My guess is, I already believed most of the sequences before I even read them.
I had exactly the same reaction. Most of it seemed obvious in retrospect. Heck, few years ago (when I had a lot more of free time) I spent many weeks thinking about how could I code a smart virtual assistant/proto-AI. Then later, after reading the sequences I realized that I figured out many of described concepts myself, except I lacked the proper formalisms and maybe haven't thought some things thoroughly enough.
It's actually fairly typical for cults to rationalize and explain away their cultish behaviors. That's not to argue that the lesswrong group is a cult, just that it's not any kind of argument against it.
My take is that during the first 12-15 chapters or so, LessWrong was using the context of the Potter-verse as a pretext to write about his vision on what constitutes "rationality", which may be called "Bayesianism", but I am not really sure. And YES, this part is insufferable. I found that dialogs between Harry and McGonagall were specially awful since those pushed me out of suspension of disbelief almost on a sentence by sentence basis.
The history however gets better, at least in the sense that the author stops preaching through the main characters and begins to actually write a story. There are multiple ways this story may offend a portion of its readers, so it is not for every one, but strictly speaking the flow gets better after the first few chapters.
Without giving spoilers away, some of the things that tend to annoy people the most are:
* Whether the main character (Harry) is a mary sue or not.
* The promotion or demotion of certain support characters in comparison with the canon.
* The value system of the author, which keeps leaking through the whole story and may touch one sensible fiber or another from time to time.
Personally, these issues do not bother me a lot. However I am aware of the shortcomings and would set the story a PG-18+ rating. While it is one of my guilty pleasures, I would not stand any of my children dwell in this kind of "rationality porn" before they have had some exposure to the real world and have pondered over some of the ethical issues that are fiercely debated in our society.
There's a line somewhere in the story where I think Harry is delighted to have found at Hogwarts a group of people who talk like people in novels instead of all the other people he knows from school. It's a line that resonated with me for sure but gets at some of what I don't like about this philosophy.
