I worked in engineering at Google from 2007-2015. I conducted … I can’t remember, definitely more than 100, maybe something like 200 in-person onsite technical interviews. (In addition to loads of phone screens, but I couldn’t see those people.)
Not a single person wore a suit.
If anyone had, I would have been very surprised and I would have immediately started wondering what other memos that candidate had not received.
I was a little surprised there’s not more in land. “The only thing they’re not making more of,” etc. etc.
A little light poking showed that the most expensive land in the US is in high-end residential real estate, which is largely owned by rich individuals rather than by corporations.
I guess businesses know better than to build on expensive land. They build on cheap land—or land containing something much better than dirt and rock that they can extract—and then they make stuff on that land.
The only exception would be for hotels and high-end retail, I suppose? And it looks like hotels didn’t make the cut and high-end retail was dwarfed by commodity retail.
So, uh, never mind.
Absolutely yes. Nate is that spokesperson, and he is carrying a far heavier load of interviews and appearances during the book tour than Eliezer is. We are actively passing the torch.
No, you will not miss much, carry on reading!
… I don’t think so?
Urs wants DRM-free.
Hachette likes DRM.
We’re working with Hachette.
Therefore Urs shouldn’t hold their breath.
I think that all just straightforwardly adds up? I certainly wasn’t aiming to be sarcastic.
Per Nate’s best guess without re-reviewing the contract: unfortunately, you’ll have to take it up with the publisher; they own the relevant copyrights (as is standard in any trad publishing deal). [Note: I originally overstated Nate’s confidence here; the error was mine.]
I can add that at least in the US, I wouldn’t hold my breath; Little, Brown is a division/imprint of Hachette, which is famous for supporting DRM.
Eliezer says: “There are always infinite policies to consider. I didn’t consider that one and neither did young Hermione.”
Eliezer’s reply, sent to me and copy-pasted in:
Riddle having set up Hagrid, having asked Dumbledore for an introduction to Flamel, and his general demeanor etc, was more than sufficient info for Dumbledore. There were not two candidates for who Voldemort could possibly be.
Eliezer says he doesn’t recall ever contemplating either of these questions. (Sorry!)
Eliezer’s reply, sent to me and copy-pasted in:
Voldemort was flatly not expecting Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres. He was expecting Tom Riddle Jr. Jr. Voldemort knew how to handle Himself v2, and it at no point occurred to Voldemort that, for example, Harry would run off and tell McGonagall about the Parseltongue whisper telling him to seek out the Chamber of Secrets. It’s not like Voldemort had ever previously been a dad, and he was not calibrated on kids being surprising.
Eliezer’s reply, sent to me and copy-pasted in:
Hard to say at this point! In my head it would’ve included breaking Black out of Azkaban, Hermione being eaten by the troll, Quirrell and Harry descending together to go after the Philosopher’s Stone, the final duel between Harry and the Death Eaters foreshadowed in Ch. 1, Dumbledore’s prophecies, and Harry’s ascent over magical Britain. I don’t know if I would’ve revealed every one of those beats to the winning reader, but those are the most central plot beats as I saw them.
Eliezer’s reply, sent to me and copy-pasted in:
This is really complicated because there was a central plot bunny of “what if my own version of this” that burped into my head after reading a couple of million words of Harry Potter fanfiction. But the very very first version involved young Harry watching in horror as Snape crucioed into permanent insanity Voldemort’s face on the back of Quirrell’s head. The second version was more like, in Death Note metaphor and the way I phrased it inside my own head, “Light Yagami (Voldemort) is older and smarter and has 300 horcruxes, Headmaster L (Dumbledore) is pretending to be insane, and then into the middle of their duel wanders a young Miles Vorkosigan (Harry) starting his first year at Hogwarts.” This one will sound more familiar if you know Death Note and Vorkosigan.
But the things that start as bunnies in their own right, rather than things on the way to other things, have their origins in “my own take on Harry Potter fanfiction” rather than some grand scheme or ordering by importance. I knew, from the moment I first thought about “what do I do with the canon plot beat of the troll”, that Hermione was going to be eaten by the troll, because I had read six dozen fanfictions with their own take on “what happens when Harry and Ron chase after Hermione to confront the troll” and nothing serious ever, ever happened with the troll that was really bad and said something about the actual consequences of having a school that unsafe. So the primary thing was, “What if there were actual consequences of having a troll running loose in the school, unlike these hundred other fanfictions in which there are not”, and then from other considerations like, “Well, okay, but how do you do justice to Hermione’s grand character rather than having her being eaten by a troll” and from there and other constraints flows the whole character of Hermione.
So the answer to this question is a strange list of things that looks more like “which plot bunnies first leap into your mind” and not “which are the most important and indispensable qualities of the story”. If I wanted it to not be a bad story, if I wanted to do justice to the character of Hermione, she had to be eaten by the troll as a consequence of her own heroic choices. But the great story-defining archetype of Hermione as hero actually comes causally afterward, and as a rationalization of, the underlying plot bunny, of my instantly knowing the moment I contemplated “What do I do with this Station of the Canon” that in *this* fanfiction the troll was gonna actually eat Hermione for once.
Fixed, thank you!
I have now fixed the chart, thanks again!
Thanks for telling us your inferences! While I can see how you got there, I believe you’re just straight-up wrong in this case. From many conversations with Eliezer about these epilogues over multiple years, I believe he absolutely does want to write and publish them and there’s basically no feinting-for-the-purpose-of-trolling or feinting-for-the-purpose-of-encouraging-fanfiction at all.
The most likely explanation is simply that I messed up. As I was reading back the text in that section I felt a little confused and decided to make a diagram for it. I showed the diagram to Eliezer and said, “Should I include this? It’s practically begging for people to point out all the things I got wrong.” He made a few corrections of his own and then we decided to ship it.
Anyway, keep nitpicking[1], I’ll revise/fix the mistakes as a batch in a few days. (Busy this weekend.)
Where “nitpicking” here is not meant negatively, I appreciate constructive criticism a lot and prefer for my articles to be correct!
Thanks, this is great and I unironically enjoyed reading it. (I personally wasn’t following HPMOR discourse back in the day. Maybe lots of people wrote lots of great critiques, but I wasn’t there then and didn’t read them, so I don’t already know all this stuff.)
As you already admitted, there are only a few actual questions here, but there are a few. When I get a chance I will attempt to extract the questions and see if I can get a response from Eliezer for you. Please do not hold your breath, it will be at least several days and possibly longer (or forever), because as I said, it’s a busy time.
But I do appreciate you writing this up, thanks.
You are welcome to ask your own questions here and I will try to solicit answers, though I make no promises—it’s a busy time. I’m interested to hear what you want to know!
… by a sniper?