I would buy a 24-piece assortment of Ninja Duck party favors.



Because Ninja Ducks are awesome.

 

Oh this. This this. Damn you, now I desperately want that.

 

Hmm, what would I buy for $11?



Eh, I'd actually pay 11 bucks for it. It's a half a million word fanfiction that I haven't read past a few chapters. Plus, I'd say considering HPMOR's popularity, it probably might have raised the collective IQ of FFN by some small amount.

 

That's probably the dumbest thing that I've ever seen you say, and that is an impressive feat, considering some of your stranger posts. For one, it's free, you moron. I'm not even going to address the IQ comment, there aren't words.


It's also a shit story, but that's a different matter entirely.

 

I looked at his latest chapter author note.

This is how a cult starts. A bloody cult from Harry Potter fan fiction.

 

I don't see what's wrong with encouraging that sort of mental training. In fact, if it became part of the standardized school curriculum, I wouldn't complain at all.

 

Err...am I the only one who doesn't see anything bad with that?

Edit: And Iztiak, I'm sorry. I love having physical copies, even if I have to pay for them. Imagine that. Hell, I would pay for a few of DLP fics if they were available.

 

I agree with T3t here, but I'd have to say the 'Center for Applied Rationality' does sound like something straight out of a dystopian world.

 

Sorry once I read that sentence my mind just shutdown.

Too many buzzword sounding like words.

Heh.

This is how it starts dont you see? Then they'll buy an apartment building. Call themselves "Followers of Yudkowsky" Then they'll buy up a disturbing amount of fertilizer....


No I havent been playing Swat 4.

 

I haven't checked up on the MoR series in about a year or so. Is it finished or is it still a WiP?

 

Still a WiP. As long as this particular goose keeps laying golden eggs, he's not going to cook it.

 

So someone is selling an unfinished fanfiction for money? And people are buying it? I could understand if it was finished but....hopefully somewhere on the cover of the physical copy it has a disclaimer saying that it isn't the finished product.

 

So your only problem with the fact that someone is paying money for the first twenty chapters of a fanfiction is that it isn't finished? Not that someone (Lulu, in this case) was making money off of someone else's creation? Or that people think this is fine and call others trolls for reporting copyright violation?

Sorry, don't mean to jump down your throat about it but everything dodgy about Yudkowsky's story and its blatant commercialization annoys me.

 

I think it's important to keep the sciences related to this topic - cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, statistics, decision theory, game theory, logic - and Yudkowsky separate in your minds. The sciences are perfectly valid and valuable endeavours. Yudkowsky's religious approach is cult-like.

Most people involved in these sciences are trying to understand human behaviour as it is. Yudkowsky tries to use the results to change human behaviour. The difference is like that between the scientist and the engineer. He's using perfectly good science to develop questionable behavioural "technology".

I say questionable because it's not clear to me that people behaving in completely rational ways is actually desirable, especially when your definition of rational is that of mathematics and economics - the idea of the self-interested agent who maximises utility. It seems to me that, in day to day human behaviour, there is a definite place for irrationality. Social interaction should not be a predictable science. Only people who are currently socially inept would desire to make it become so.

Of course public policy and large scale social decisions should be based on science, but in so far as policy should take into account the way people actually behave, it should also take into account irrationality (this is the problem of classical vs. behavioural economics).

Edit: and then, of course, you also have to keep Yudkowsky's real life endeavours and MoR separate too. Before all this asking for donations and selling on Lulu started, MoR was just another bad piece of fanfiction, and was harmless. Our objections were to the content of the fic* and to the guy trolling on DLP, which lumped it into a very large category of fanfics DLP thinks are bad. The point at which this became, for me, more than just another case of bad fanfiction was the aforementioned commercialisation of fanfic. Legality aside, I simply find it distasteful, both because it contradicts the amateur spirit in which fanfiction is undertaken, and because I have a trained kneejerk reaction to any kind of plagiarism.

*My own objection explained here:

Spoiler

I can't help but feel that MoR is not really a story. More a textbook with bits of narrative in between. At best it's a fable.

A story should having a beginning, middle and end. It should have a plot. It should be going somewhere, and the reader should be able to feel that progression. MoR is just a series of stuff happening, with a bunch of lectures jammed in between.

Further, it holds both canon and the HP fandom at large in contempt. The author hasn't even read all of the books, but feels completely at ease issuing statements about what he considers the problems with canon. He also seems to think that his solutions are the only possible ones to the "problems" he sees with canon.

Personally, I feel that many of his solutions are worse than the so-called problems he sees. His transfiguration system is one example. By making transfiguration non-permanent and trying to integrate it with current scientific knowledge (e.g. atomic theory) he creates massive problems for himself. For example, he draws a somewhat arbitrary distinction between solids vs. liquids and gases.

It's not even as clever as it thinks it is (and it thinks itself very clever: the tone is insufferably smug). There's nothing in there you wouldn't know from a) taking a few 101 classes and b) using common sense. E.g. the bystander effect. I think almost everyone knows that this happens - individual people are reluctant to act in groups. Do we really make ourselves smarter or gain knowledge by giving it a name? Or are we just being self-indulgent and thinking ourselves clever?

Quantifying the degree to which someone is a bystander, and then discovering some quantifiable relation between this and likelihood of action - that would be gaining new and useful knowledge. If MoR talked about that, I'd be impressed. But it doesn't. It just mentions the bystander effect and moves on - the worst kind of name dropping. Look at me! I'm so clever! Simply observing that the bystander effect happens is the most trivial kind of science possible - going around categorising and naming those things about human behaviour that we already know.

Spoiler

My feeling is that you have to make a choice: either you're writing fiction, and have to focus on things like pace, flow, characterisation, believability, consistency, plot, setting, etc. or you choose to convey ideas, and have to focus on accuracy, comprehensiveness, and depth of understanding.

MoR aims for a middle point, and I just don't think that it's possible to do that middle point well. It ends up failing as fiction and failing as education. What we end up with is:

1. A story that's frequently interrupted by authorial-mouthpiece lectures from the characters, that has no sense of pace or direction, that frequently alternates in tone from serious to humour to deep thoughts and back again, and that is frustrating because it contains some great ideas (e.g. awesome Quirrel) that don't get to be fleshed out as they should be, and would be, in a story whose sole aim was to tell a great story.

2. An education that is shallow, simplified, and occasionally actively harmful to understanding (e.g. some of the sections on philosophy of science).

 

I agree with everything you said about Lulu illegally making money and I would support JKR or whomever if they were to pursue that case in court. I admit that I'm disappointed in the MoR author for calling everyone at DLP trolls because it's such a blanket statement. Admittedly there are trolls in almost every forum and I think it was one of those heat of the moment things where he didn't literally mean everyone here and made a minor slip up.

 

I think it's time we brought this thread back on topic. I think I'd buy this with my eleven dollars.



Well, it's eleven pounds. But who the hell cares about exchange rates?

 

One of the better <$11 red wines out there:



Laurel Glen Reds 2007 from Lodi, California.

 

This is what I had for lunch and dinner. Clam Chowder on bread bowl and a classic cheeseburger.
Total bill for the two meals? 11 dollars

 

I haven't read MoR. Don't really read HP fanfic, I'm mostly here for Dresden. From what I'm hearing - particularly from Taure - it sounds like Terry Goodkind and Pontification - I mean Sword - of Truth books.

I have no desire to read those, either.

I would rather, for $11, go to Home Depot, and buy a hammer and a box of nails to drive through my testicles.

Edit: Ninja Ducks are awesome.