Thanks for those answers; but they don’t quite explain
why some people are induced to change their life by it (perhaps only because it piques their interest for other material on LessWrong)
why some readers get more enthusiastic about it than about some excellent non-fanfic books. (These readers are mostly not part of a group that might put social pressure on them to become fans.)
why Eliezer has described his own work as “fictional literature from what looks like an entirely different literary tradition.” (That’s in the April Fool’s post, but he has said similar things elsewhere. And though this bullet point could be explained as arrogance on the part of Eliezer, some comments I’ve seen suggest that many fans agree with him.)
why some people are induced to change their life by it (perhaps only because it piques their interest for other material on LessWrong)
I’m also kind of surprised by this but… actually how rare really is it for people to say “X caused me to change my life.”
I do know for a fact that people have changed their lives based on canon Harry Potter, with hundreds of people becoming obsessed with different character pairings etc. So maybe it isn’t too surprising that it would happen with HPMoR, at least to a few people.
A weird fact about humanity and mass society is that virtually anything that reaches a large enough audience will wind up with some obsessive fans. As an example, dozens of women pledged their undying devotion to Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker.”
why Eliezer has described his own work as “fictional literature from what looks like an entirely different literary tradition.”
Characters in HPMOR do things for rational reasons. Smart characters are smart and make their decisions based on careful thought instead of unexplained flashes of insight.
That not something that happens in normal fiction. If you think that’s not new, which works of fiction do you consider to have the same quality?
why some people are induced to change their life by it (perhaps only because it piques their interest for other material on LessWrong)
Because HPMOR often has morals to teach.
There are a lot of atheists who are essentially like Harry’s father. They wouldn’t run experiments to test whether magic exist but simply assume that it doesn’t exist and get angry with everyone who claims magic exists. By having a well written story they might update into the direction of empricism.
It teaches a version of science that about experiements and not about reading authoritative papers. That might raise in at least a few readers the question of why they aren’t doing science in their lifes.
The narrative about taking heroic responsiblity is strong. For me it was strong enough to make some decisions about taking responsibility that I otherwise might not have made.
To me HPMOR feels deeper than Pratchett. Pratchett makes a lot of points on the surface and plays around with them. HPMOR had a bunch of instances where Eliezer made point that weren’t obvious and buried deeper. Enough for most readers to not consciously get them, but that doesn’t prevent the reader from absorbing the moral a more unconscious level.
In hypnosis telling metaphars that take the brain months to understand is a teaching device for creative deep belief changes. HPMoR frequenlty makes point on that level. I would not have expected to find that in writing by someone like Eliezer and it made me update into thinking that Eliezer understands more than I previously thought. Eliezer doesn’t have a hypnosis background but learned his lessons about deep metaphor somewhere else. Probably by dealing with zen koan’s and how they are used for teaching.
If I had to guess, I’d guess that it targets a particular kind of audience that most fiction isn’t targeted at, and consequently appeals to that audience more than excellent other books targeted elsewhere.
Because most fiction (including fanfics) doesn’t include such explicit teachings that are applicable to one’s life. Usually it’s found in non-fiction, and didactic works of fiction usually must be subtle lest they be labeled “preachy”.
The themes in and lessons of HPMOR are relatively uncommon in fiction.
Didactic fiction is a rarity in modern times, and writings that are both didactic and tell a story well are rarer still.
Because most fiction (including fanfics) doesn’t include such explicit teachings that are applicable to one’s life. Usually it’s found in non-fiction, and didactic works of fiction usually must be subtle lest they be labeled “preachy”.
I just made the point on the /r/HPMOR subreddit that with most fiction, the author wants to share a story with you, but with some authors (for example, Yudkowsky or Stephenson), they have knowledge they want to share with you and their way of sharing is through story.
I’m sure their are other authors who also do this, but they seem to be few and far between, making HPMOR one of the first works of that kind people may encounter.
Also, most authors who do want to show or teach something through their story tend to do it subtly and non-explicitly, perhaps because being open and explicit about a message is low-status.
I thought about it before I typed it out and I found that most authors do want to show or teach something, but that this is often something obvious. Harry Potter (canon) teaches us that Nazis are bad, that you shouldn’t trust an oppressive government, that bureaucracies can be dangerous, that you shouldn’t torture people… but when I read the novels (at the appropriate age, I grew up with them) I had already learned those lessons.
What Anathem, Snow Crash and HPMOR taught me were things I wouldn’t have picked up on my own.
It’s interesting to note that HP canon is aimed at children/teens, and that books aimed at those demographics tend to be more open about teaching something. It would be interesting to consider how often fiction aimed at adults is didactic, and how open adult didactic fiction is about its message.
Didactic fiction is a rarity in modern times, and writings that are both didactic and tell a story well are rarer still.
I’m not so sure about this. Didactic and polemic works are uncommon (though not unknown) in genre fiction, but they seem less so in literary fiction; George Orwell is the first writer that comes to mind, but he’s by no means the last. I’ve even heard didactic content described as a prerequisite of literary quality, though I can’t remember where at the moment.
It’s been a while but why do you consider Orwell to be didactic. He makes political points but from what I remember from 1984 it’s not really about decisions are made in daily life.
A work doesn’t need to inform daily life in order to be didactic. 1984 is about the dynamics of totalitarianism, Animal Farm is a thinly fictionalized Russian Revolution, Down and Out in London and Paris is about class relations in Western Europe, and so forth—but practically everything Orwell wrote was primarily meant to be instructive in some way.
Maybe I have too precise a definition, but I think “didactic” should mean giving advice, and not just information. Almost all fiction is about psychological insight, but that isn’t directly practical. And I don’t mean “practical” in a daily life way: the reason I don’t count Animal Farm as didactic isn’t because I’m not a Bolshevik, but because even if I were, it still wouldn’t tell me how to change the course of the revolution.
By that definition nearly all serious fiction is didactic and there are plenty of people in the English department who find didactic elements in the rest.
blacktrance used didactic to mean “teachings that are applicable to one’s life”. I don’t think Orwell fits.
I wouldn’t say “nearly all”, but quite a lot of it, yes, and probably a larger fraction since 1945. That’s the point.
I don’t think we should restrict the word to everyday living, but if we did, I could point to Hermann Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Ayn Rand, and plenty of others.
My experience with HPMoR has been to find a story that is a) dementedly funny, b) loaded with a pile of mysteries to keep you wondering about crazy theories late at night, c) internally consistent and well narrated, d) useful for indirectly teaching people about rational techniques.
I was not aware of the number of rationalist novels circulating out there, and HPMoR was the first case I found of a fictional character explicitly defending my pet causes (empiricism, privileging experimentation, reductionism, atheism, the importance of SF in teaching creative thought). Among other effects, it naturally makes the reader want to know more about the author.
Very few books in any genre are as good at maintaining a constant and exciting level of interaction between interesting characters. Even some of the works that have HPJEV style characters like Miles Vorkosigan (who I love) tend to lean heavily on their central character. Harry Potter is extremely impportant to HPMOR but all his best scenes are interplays with draco, hermione and quirrel which involve back and forth interaction rather than simply domination.
Thanks for those answers; but they don’t quite explain
why some people are induced to change their life by it (perhaps only because it piques their interest for other material on LessWrong)
why some readers get more enthusiastic about it than about some excellent non-fanfic books. (These readers are mostly not part of a group that might put social pressure on them to become fans.)
why Eliezer has described his own work as “fictional literature from what looks like an entirely different literary tradition.” (That’s in the April Fool’s post, but he has said similar things elsewhere. And though this bullet point could be explained as arrogance on the part of Eliezer, some comments I’ve seen suggest that many fans agree with him.)
I’m also kind of surprised by this but… actually how rare really is it for people to say “X caused me to change my life.”
I do know for a fact that people have changed their lives based on canon Harry Potter, with hundreds of people becoming obsessed with different character pairings etc. So maybe it isn’t too surprising that it would happen with HPMoR, at least to a few people.
A weird fact about humanity and mass society is that virtually anything that reaches a large enough audience will wind up with some obsessive fans. As an example, dozens of women pledged their undying devotion to Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker.”
Characters in HPMOR do things for rational reasons. Smart characters are smart and make their decisions based on careful thought instead of unexplained flashes of insight.
That not something that happens in normal fiction. If you think that’s not new, which works of fiction do you consider to have the same quality?
Because HPMOR often has morals to teach.
There are a lot of atheists who are essentially like Harry’s father. They wouldn’t run experiments to test whether magic exist but simply assume that it doesn’t exist and get angry with everyone who claims magic exists. By having a well written story they might update into the direction of empricism.
It teaches a version of science that about experiements and not about reading authoritative papers. That might raise in at least a few readers the question of why they aren’t doing science in their lifes.
The narrative about taking heroic responsiblity is strong. For me it was strong enough to make some decisions about taking responsibility that I otherwise might not have made.
To me HPMOR feels deeper than Pratchett. Pratchett makes a lot of points on the surface and plays around with them. HPMOR had a bunch of instances where Eliezer made point that weren’t obvious and buried deeper. Enough for most readers to not consciously get them, but that doesn’t prevent the reader from absorbing the moral a more unconscious level.
In hypnosis telling metaphars that take the brain months to understand is a teaching device for creative deep belief changes. HPMoR frequenlty makes point on that level.
I would not have expected to find that in writing by someone like Eliezer and it made me update into thinking that Eliezer understands more than I previously thought. Eliezer doesn’t have a hypnosis background but learned his lessons about deep metaphor somewhere else. Probably by dealing with zen koan’s and how they are used for teaching.
If I had to guess, I’d guess that it targets a particular kind of audience that most fiction isn’t targeted at, and consequently appeals to that audience more than excellent other books targeted elsewhere.
Because most fiction (including fanfics) doesn’t include such explicit teachings that are applicable to one’s life. Usually it’s found in non-fiction, and didactic works of fiction usually must be subtle lest they be labeled “preachy”.
The themes in and lessons of HPMOR are relatively uncommon in fiction.
Didactic fiction is a rarity in modern times, and writings that are both didactic and tell a story well are rarer still.
I just made the point on the /r/HPMOR subreddit that with most fiction, the author wants to share a story with you, but with some authors (for example, Yudkowsky or Stephenson), they have knowledge they want to share with you and their way of sharing is through story.
I’m sure their are other authors who also do this, but they seem to be few and far between, making HPMOR one of the first works of that kind people may encounter.
Also, most authors who do want to show or teach something through their story tend to do it subtly and non-explicitly, perhaps because being open and explicit about a message is low-status.
I thought about it before I typed it out and I found that most authors do want to show or teach something, but that this is often something obvious. Harry Potter (canon) teaches us that Nazis are bad, that you shouldn’t trust an oppressive government, that bureaucracies can be dangerous, that you shouldn’t torture people… but when I read the novels (at the appropriate age, I grew up with them) I had already learned those lessons.
What Anathem, Snow Crash and HPMOR taught me were things I wouldn’t have picked up on my own.
It’s interesting to note that HP canon is aimed at children/teens, and that books aimed at those demographics tend to be more open about teaching something. It would be interesting to consider how often fiction aimed at adults is didactic, and how open adult didactic fiction is about its message.
I’m not so sure about this. Didactic and polemic works are uncommon (though not unknown) in genre fiction, but they seem less so in literary fiction; George Orwell is the first writer that comes to mind, but he’s by no means the last. I’ve even heard didactic content described as a prerequisite of literary quality, though I can’t remember where at the moment.
It’s been a while but why do you consider Orwell to be didactic. He makes political points but from what I remember from 1984 it’s not really about decisions are made in daily life.
A work doesn’t need to inform daily life in order to be didactic. 1984 is about the dynamics of totalitarianism, Animal Farm is a thinly fictionalized Russian Revolution, Down and Out in London and Paris is about class relations in Western Europe, and so forth—but practically everything Orwell wrote was primarily meant to be instructive in some way.
Maybe I have too precise a definition, but I think “didactic” should mean giving advice, and not just information. Almost all fiction is about psychological insight, but that isn’t directly practical. And I don’t mean “practical” in a daily life way: the reason I don’t count Animal Farm as didactic isn’t because I’m not a Bolshevik, but because even if I were, it still wouldn’t tell me how to change the course of the revolution.
By that definition nearly all serious fiction is didactic and there are plenty of people in the English department who find didactic elements in the rest.
blacktrance used didactic to mean “teachings that are applicable to one’s life”. I don’t think Orwell fits.
I wouldn’t say “nearly all”, but quite a lot of it, yes, and probably a larger fraction since 1945. That’s the point.
I don’t think we should restrict the word to everyday living, but if we did, I could point to Hermann Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Ayn Rand, and plenty of others.
My experience with HPMoR has been to find a story that is a) dementedly funny, b) loaded with a pile of mysteries to keep you wondering about crazy theories late at night, c) internally consistent and well narrated, d) useful for indirectly teaching people about rational techniques.
I was not aware of the number of rationalist novels circulating out there, and HPMoR was the first case I found of a fictional character explicitly defending my pet causes (empiricism, privileging experimentation, reductionism, atheism, the importance of SF in teaching creative thought). Among other effects, it naturally makes the reader want to know more about the author.
Very few books in any genre are as good at maintaining a constant and exciting level of interaction between interesting characters. Even some of the works that have HPJEV style characters like Miles Vorkosigan (who I love) tend to lean heavily on their central character. Harry Potter is extremely impportant to HPMOR but all his best scenes are interplays with draco, hermione and quirrel which involve back and forth interaction rather than simply domination.