The science material is presented to the reader in good faith, by the protagonist, who is only ever shown to be wrong in his attempts to link the science to magic, not the science itself. If it’s attempting to be faithful to the Harry’s youthful hubris, then shouldn’t there be parts when Hermione says “actually Harry, you’ve misunderstood Kahneman and Tversky on X, Y and Z …”, like what happens for magical topics?
There is a section on the site called “science” which reads
All science mentioned in Methods is standard science except where otherwise specified (IIRC, the only two uses of nonstandard theories are Barbour’s timeless physics in Ch. 28 and my own timeless decision theory in Ch. 33). Wherever possible, I have mentioned standard terminology inside the book to make Googling easier. At some future point I may compile a complete list for all the scientific references in Methods, but this has not yet been done.
and if that weren’t enough, Yudkowsky explicitly states that the science material is meant to be didactic.
Furthermore, “but it’s better in the Sequences” is a terrible excuse. How many people are going to read a fun work of fiction, vs a sprawling 888 series of contrarian philosophy essays? A significant fraction of people on this very sitehave not read them, and then imagine what the odds are for the average fanfic reader (of whom there are an order of magnitude or two more than LessWrong users). Thousands of people are reading this story and taking what Yudkowsky says on faith (did you independently Google every science reference in the story? I sure didn’t), so if the science is wrong then that’s thousands of people coming away worse-off than when they started, and Yudkowsky is aware of this possibility..
The ironic thing about those exceptions is that bringing in Barbour’s timeless physics is arguably itself one of the errors. In Harry’s explanation of how he was able to perform partial transfiguration, there’s nothing from Barbour except the phrase ‘timeless physics’; Harry’s explication of that, as enforcing a relationship between separate time slices rather than performing a change, is the standard idea of a block universe, going back at least to 1908.
The science material is presented to the reader in good faith, by the protagonist, who is only ever shown to be wrong in his attempts to link the science to magic, not the science itself. If it’s attempting to be faithful to the Harry’s youthful hubris, then shouldn’t there be parts when Hermione says “actually Harry, you’ve misunderstood Kahneman and Tversky on X, Y and Z …”, like what happens for magical topics?
There is a section on the site called “science” which reads
and if that weren’t enough, Yudkowsky explicitly states that the science material is meant to be didactic.
Furthermore, “but it’s better in the Sequences” is a terrible excuse. How many people are going to read a fun work of fiction, vs a sprawling 888 series of contrarian philosophy essays? A significant fraction of people on this very site have not read them, and then imagine what the odds are for the average fanfic reader (of whom there are an order of magnitude or two more than LessWrong users). Thousands of people are reading this story and taking what Yudkowsky says on faith (did you independently Google every science reference in the story? I sure didn’t), so if the science is wrong then that’s thousands of people coming away worse-off than when they started, and Yudkowsky is aware of this possibility..
The ironic thing about those exceptions is that bringing in Barbour’s timeless physics is arguably itself one of the errors. In Harry’s explanation of how he was able to perform partial transfiguration, there’s nothing from Barbour except the phrase ‘timeless physics’; Harry’s explication of that, as enforcing a relationship between separate time slices rather than performing a change, is the standard idea of a block universe, going back at least to 1908.