I have a complicated relationship with “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” but I guess I’d be lying if I said I disliked it. I think it’s much less successful than HPMoR, but I can think of several reasons for that:
- MIRI is doing this all on its own, and in this form, at its current stage of development. This means that it has a lower overall level of quality control, in terms of being willing to take risks, and so on.
- MIRI is a smaller, more insular community of people who are also working at this level of quality control
- It’s easy to take for granted that a work of fiction is “good” if you enjoy it, and “bad” if you don’t, and it’s easy to take for granted that only those people will feel this way and not just everyone who reads it, because it was written for you specifically and you are a unique snowflake who doesn’t care for anything but your own specific brand of “goodness” and “badness”
I think the MIRI stuff is “good” in a very literal sense – you could read it, and it would make you feel some things you didn’t feel about other things – but I’m just so used to being able to do that with stuff that it’s not really noticeable to me anymore.




















