71–80 of 92 posts
I suspect the hardest part of plotting this story must not have been changing Harry, but changing Voldemort. How on earth could someone capable of challenging the advanced Harry manage to lose so thoroughly against only Rowling canon good-guys?
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Oh, I know about the RSS feed, I just prefer it this way. :-)
Highly irrational, but I understand and approve!
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Use a time machine to prove/disprove P == NP Hold up. P==NP is only proved if you have a time machine.[1] It's still unknown in story if you can do it with a conventional, causal, turing machine. Also note that Harry is either ahead of the times (he doesn't mention the Moravec paper in-story) or very, very au courant, being perhaps the only eleven year old in the world to be reading preprints of theoretical computer…
Actually, it happens to be true that all eleven-year-olds attending wizarding school read preprints of theoretical computer science papers.
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It strikes me as slightly ironic that this book is so popular here. After all, it's in praise of rationality, whereas HN is a community of entrepreneurs; A profession where the odds against you are so great that you almost couldn't get out of bed in the morning without delusions of grandeur, or at least a healthy dose of narcissism.
Right, and the main character of this story never faces heavy odds, nor tries to do anything ambitious, and nobody in his universe ever accused him of having delusions of grandeur... I gotta ask here, have you read up to Chapter 5?
What I like about this novel that is not directly related to rationality, is that Eliezer pays a lot of attention to the motivation of the "villains". Why would anyone want to be a Death Eater? Why on earth do Malfoy or Crabbe & Goyle act the way they do. Completely unconvincing in the original, (and almost all villains in Hollywood movies for that matter), but in MoR they have a convincing motivation for why they ac…
As for the Malfoys, it's clear to anyone who read the books that they are not one-dimensional villains. Crabbe and Goyle might be, but they were never important.
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Have you read Asimov recently? In the cold light of adulthood it is unfortunately not as good as my inner child remembers. Nowhere near as bad as Rowling, who is an awful writer, but still pretty bad. To be fair to Rowling her first book actually introduced some good ideas, the rest were pretty much universally crap. Some of Asimov's themes and ideas are also feeling very dated now too, he seemed to be heavily influe…
If you're going to posture as an amateur writing critic, thinking about the social context of Asimov's writing, you probably shouldn't also condemn a writer loved by readers, writers, and critics as "pretty much universally crap". It's counter-cultural and pretentious yet very shallow, and so you lose a lot of credibility as a critic.
I mean, look at http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=asimov%20%22prose... . These people aren't making it up; Asimov will never be praised for his striking style, magnificent metaphors, or lucid descriptions, like, say, Gene Wolfe is.
I suspect the hardest part of plotting this story must not have been changing Harry, but changing Voldemort. How on earth could someone capable of challenging the advanced Harry manage to lose so thoroughly against only Rowling canon good-guys?
Not sure how far you've read, but it is not at all certain that Voldemort wants to challenge Harry. Whatever his plans are for Harry, they don't involve killing him -- at least not in the near term.
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Not sure how far you've read, but it is not at all certain that Voldemort wants to challenge Harry. Whatever his plans are for Harry, they don't involve killing him -- at least not in the near term.
I meant challenge as in, be up to the job of opposing him. This Voldemort does oppose Harry's plans , long term, largely because he doesn't get the idea of making the world better for everyone, he just wants out.
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I meant challenge as in, be up to the job of opposing him. This Voldemort does oppose Harry's plans , long term, largely because he doesn't get the idea of making the world better for everyone, he just wants out.
The methods Harry would employ would achieve Voldemort's aims as well, and if Voldemort's horcruxes work as advertised, he shouldn't care too much about the time frame.
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It's contrived because the goal of the story was to get people to think about metaethics. It's still pretty good for entertainment value though. b) was a reference to http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/ There was some discussion of this when the chapter was posted. The rape idea was really weird, but it made more sense after reading some of the discussion: http://lesswrong.com/lw/y8/interlude_with_the_con…
I've read the comments, and the point still stands. There's a reason that I had never heard of a "weirdtopian" novel before. If something is outside of the scope of what humans are capable of, it's very jarring to one's suspension of disbelief. Just because it fits with his desire to make it weirdtopian doesn't mean I like it any better.
If you mean that an individual human couldn't view sex as something outside themselves, then maybe.