Comment by gjm11

I've definitely seen people cite it as the thing that brought them into the rationalist community, but that's very different from treating it as a holy text.

The rest of it, not so much. Of course I've seen people say positive things about it, and I've seen people say more positive things about it than I think it deserves. But that, too, is very different from treating it as a holy text; surely the same is true of pretty much anything that a lot of people have read and liked.

I just did a search for comments on LessWrong in the last year that contain the string "HPMOR" -- unsurprisingly there are hundreds of them, so I looked at the first few pages of results. I found a fair amount of "X reminded me of Y in HPMOR" but nothing that looked (to me; of course I might have blind spots) as if the thing was being treated like sacred scripture. E.g., no instances of "you say X, but HPMOR says Y, so obviously you're wrong" or the like.

It feels to me less like the way Christians relate to the Bible and more like the way they relate to, say, the works of C S Lewis. A shared bit of culture that can be referred to; something a lot of them like; in some cases the thing that brought them "into the fold".

Maybe I've just failed to notice. Maybe I've noticed in the past but forgotten. (I'm pretty good at forgetting things.) Maybe the search I just did was the wrong one -- e.g., maybe for some reason rationalists treating HPMOR as scripture tend not to call it "HPMOR" while doing so. But so far I remain unconvinced.