Comment by habryka
5 days ago
> Eliezer Yudkowsky's "sequences" are over one million words long.
This is a particularly weird example. The median post in the "sequences" is less than 1000 words long. The sequences are mostly a long series of individually very short blogposts.
Over a million words is significantly longer than the bible and it's treated as one work:
"There also used to be a practice on LW of telling newbies who weren't producing good content to come back when they'd read the sequences."
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EauwsXht4jrjTTE9m/reading-th...
One of the things the Bible does particularly well is express ideas succinctly. Yes I know you can pull out exceptions but classically this was interpreted as itself having significance.
Are we reading the same bible? The bible is a super meandering document that repeats itself a bunch and also contradicts itself. (which is to be expected if you assume its some sort attempt at writing down and standardizing an oral myth tradition that came before it)
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presumably this is somewhat analogous to telling the newbie to go and fetch the tartan paint, or pedal powered wheelchair and the like.
More of a go away and do this thing that will take a long time because we don't want to deal with you at the moment?
His weirdo Harry Potter fanfic is 600,000 words long, which is the combined length of the first five real harry Potter books.
Wait... Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was written by Eliezer Yudkowsky? So that means he wrote that totally straight and its not a joke?
It’s real. The excessive length is one of several things that serves as a filter. Anyone dedicated enough to get through it is a believer by the end. It even includes completely unnecessary uncomfortable parts like the rape threat sequence which further filter out all but the true believers.
The ridiculousness of it all serves as a type of hazing ritual. To enter the cool club you have to grit your way through it and also The Sequenced.
Most people tap out early. Those who persevere get to join the cool kid’s club, where they haze others into reading it all too.
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That's correct. Harry Potter fanfic is a huge part of the rationalist movement, the Zizians, and more. Behind the Bastards' episodes on the Zizians do a fairly well-cited dive into it.
It's a recruitment tool.
Personally, it’s my favorite book and I consider it better than the original series (although the original series is a hard prerequisite).
However, I wouldn’t call it “long” in the same way that I wouldn’t call The Count of Monte Cristo or Great Expectations long. Serialized stories are just naturally longer because readers want a sizable chunk every week/month, regardless of that inflating the total size or not.
I have not read nor heard of this, but umm, its fanfic. People write fanfic because they enjoy the world of the story and want more of it. Why would it be a surprise that a fanfic is overly long and verbose? I'd assume that just goes with the territory.
I think you should look into what it is. It's not "just a fanfic", it is considered a foundational text for the Rationalist movement.
It's not just relevant because Yudkowsky wrote it, it's relevant because it essentially serves as Rationalism's "Torah".
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> enjoy the world of the story
I'm not sure that's the case here, because rationalist fanfics tend to instead try to tear down the world as illogical.
Example for Harry Potter and this fanfic. In Harry Potter magical currency is made of precious metals and there are bronze coints, silver coins and gold coins. And they have fixed exchange rate.
"But wait!", notices the rationalist. "Since those coins could theoretically be melted down, and rates for those metals on exchange is different I could make infinite money glitch and crash the economy. Those wizards are so dumb, haha, for thousands of years they never figured out the basic logic."
Congratulations you found an economical inconsistency in a children's book. Your next period is boxing against kindergartners.
In my mind if you were a fan of original work, you would not be doing this. You could find different explanation that does not try to paint the world as stupid. Simplest being https://xkcd.com/1494/
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You’d have a point if it was longer lol
Besides there are other HP fan fics in this range
Other HP fanfics aren't foundational texts for a worryingly influential pseudo-philosophical movement.
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It isn’t really helping beat the allegations here that multiple people are trying to disprove the author’s argument with crappy math. Ok, how many of those posts are Grand Thoughts like the author is actually talking about and what is the average length of those? How about the median? Are there a bunch of “Decided to cut my hair today” tweet style posts mixed in with the Thousand and One Commandments?