Is this the same guy who wrote the Harry Potter Rationalism fan-fic and started the ai worshipping cult?
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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yeah all while ~~being a high school dropout~~ he never went to high school
wasn't he entirely homeschooled
you're right, he couldn't be high school dropout because he never attended high school. he went to normal schools before that allegedly, but 8th grade broke him
He thinks he is too High IQ for school.
from my understanding, the ai cult initially sprang up on the forum he hosted (hosts? idk), but he didn't exactly start it, any more than Queen Elizabeth II invented punk rock.
but he did write the fanfic, and it's honestly pretty good. low bar i know, but dude's a better author than jowling ever was, and i definitely recommend it to anyone into HP fanfics.
People are always praising that fanfic for some reason so I tried reading it a while back. If it's the one I'm thinking of then hard disagree, the protagonist is a self-insert Mary Sue clearly written by a kid who thinks they're the smartest person alive. One part that still sticks in my mind years later is their fundamental misunderstanding of how fiat currency works, it was some ridiculous get-rich-quick scheme like melting down wizard currency into pure gold to sell to non-wizard community then using that money to buy silver which they'd trade up to magic society gold coins. It was some years ago so I may be misremembering the details, but there should be a ton of issues that immediately jump out to you there.
I trudged through and got as far as the first meeting with Malfoy where the author realized they were being too friendly with each other, but since Malfoy is supposed to be a bad guy they decided he should randomly blurt out something about how he wants to rape some girl.
Maybe it's just because I don't have the context of other bad fanfics, but that's a solid 0/10 from me.
The get rich quick scheme I thought was well thought out, for the 'in universe' principles that had been laid out. One galleon converted to a lot of copper, so the mary sue could take gold from the muggle world, get it made into galleons in the wizard world, trade those for a metric shit ton of copper knuts, and then take those to the muggle world to be sold for a much larger sum of money than had been used to buy the gold.
As long as you don't expect it to work forever, it would be fine. The writing was terrible, but the character established all the nuts and bolts of the operation by 'just asking' questions to the diagetic narrator: pure gold was able to be made into galleons for a fee, banks would give you your money in knuts if you asked, and the prices would work for it.
The writing was jank and the protagonist narrator insufferable, but the conclusions he drew did make sense for the world he had been placed in, as appropriate for a 'rationalist' critique of harry potter.
Edit: the part where I just threw up was where the narrator had an immediate, perfectly-thought-out-but-the-writer-couldn't-come-up-with-an-actual-thing when mcgonagoll threatened to alter his memory, but he had thought of a perfect solution to that years ago. It reminded me of terrible ttrpg players who just ad hoc added parts to their backstory so they could be mary sues in a collaborative game.
If the coins are 100% gold or copper then you're in one of two scenarios: the value of the coin is the scrap metal value, in which case swapping between gold and copper makes little difference; or, the mint buys your scrap gold and converts it in-house, pocketing the difference. A mint has no reason to convert your gold to significantly higher value coins for you, that only loses them their economic and political power in the form of currency control.
The only way it would work is if you specifically build a world where everyone else is incredibly stupid just to make yourself seem smart.
The whole basis of that scheme was the different relative exchange rates in the muggle and wizard world. There are I think 17 silver sickles to 1 gold galleon, but in the muggle world gold is more like 50 times the value of silver. The plan was to take a galleon to the muggle world, melt it down and sell the gold, use the proceeds to buy silver, bring that silver back to the wizard world and have it minted into 50 sickles, and trade those sickles for about 3 galleons.
Like many scenes in HPMOR the author is mostly just roasting Rowling for lazy world building. He didn't have to build a world where everyone else was stupid, the point is that Rowling's wizarding world already fulfilled that requirement.
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This kinda shit happens in the real world between real currencies
That's just arbitrage
It works until others realize there's an arbitrary opportunity and prices equalize
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Counterpoint: https://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor/
It's interesting. I only read a bit so far and it is definitely right sometimes, but I think it often misses the point. For example complaining that the magic system doesn't make sense is silly, since the magic is obviously trying to appear the same as in the original books (where it makes much less sense) while creating an impression that there might be some rules behind it and it being unintuitive and opaque is the whole point, since the rules are hard to find, else they would be found long ago.
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that ai cult also doubles as a get smart quick scheme
Sugar manufacturers lobbied for fats to take the blame for all of the serious health issues people have had in the last 60 years
I know in my case, cutting sugar and simple carbs has done more than cutting fats.
This reads more like an anti-science meme. Things are complex, if you don't understand them fine, but keeping yourself deliberately ignorant isn't going to stop reality from being reality.
It is, this guy is a known fraud and all-round bad dude
I literally thought this was a parody/sarcasm when I posted it lmfao.
Understandable
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this is borderline.
there's a point where we can argue that the US has shit standards for food safety. and there's arguing that chemicals names are scary.
plus, he's a bit of a weirdo with the Rocco's Basilisk and his weird harry potter fanfiction
i assure you, there is much weirder harry potter fanfiction out there. i once read a Hogwarts Castle/Giant Squid smut fic.
Also, pretty sure a fellow named Roko came up with the basilisk, not Yudkowsky.
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Downvoted for Yud. Ice this clown out.
this sounds like the kinda thing that I (uneducated in this topic) would go "heh.. yeah.." and upvote not understanding the joke
then I open comments and it's actually about tossing toddlers into a volcano and I am immediately sentenced with the guilt of upvoting a meme about child volcano sacrifice and I have to come to terms about how I am a horrible person who will blindly follow someones agenda because they were using big words and I am actually incredibly foolish and don't deserve an opinion about anything ever..
or it's just an extremely nerdy joke that nobody really understands but upvotes anyways
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This guy should learn to view science more like a constructivist. Pretty much everything in science is just something we made up that mostly aligns with the natural world, and just because one model is less accurate than another does not mean it's no longer useful.
We didn't abandon Newtonion physics when Einstein's model was accepted for instance, since Newtonian physics is still very useful, and much easier to use compared to others.
Edit: changed language from 'proven' to 'accepted'.
We didn’t abandon Newtonion physics when we accepted Einstein’s model ~~was proven~~
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I wasn't familiar with the term, but I always (until this moment) assumed that everybody viewed science that way.
The amount of people who think that scientists don't understand how bees fly is evidence that most people don't have this world view. As if someone would see a bee flying, not only having been around for eons, but a very common creature most people are familiar with, would just throw their hands up and say "WHOA! THIS VIOLATES ALL THE LAWS OF PHYSICS! THIS SHOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE!"
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Pictured: The creature who has promised to protect us from sentient machines not sounding like a carbon-based life form
If you eat more plants and animals and less breads and sugars you do lose weight and feel better. I’m no science guy but that does work. People over complicate this shit.
It's mostly the plants tbh, dietary fiber is frequently ignored in macro discussions but absolutely critical
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well, besides that other remark, sugars come from plants, though not all sugars are equal (ahem added sugar; fruit sugars are prolly fine)
fruit sugars are prolly fine
Fruits in general aren't as good for you as general thinking have them. The majority have been bred to be so exaggerated in their sugar content that, as an example, you can't feed pet primates fruit very often or they will get diabetes (without getting into the horrors that keeping primates as pets encompasses). You can quickly get an idea of this by searching for 'wild strawberries vs grocery strawberries.'
The fibrous parts of fruits is good, the 'nutritional' aspects of them are decent, but the absolute black-hole-mass of sugar on the one side of the teeter-totter is a pretty big negative for them.
I no longer trust anyone who talks about “plants” or “animals”. It turns out, every single plant or animal is doing something different!
If it copies like a pasta, it’s copypasta!
This is some ignorant shit, you.
You're over complicating this shit.
Weight loss is primarily just calories burned minus calories eaten...
(times some factor, plus/minus some constant, ignoring higher order terms, excluding exogenous variables, etc.)
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How is bread and sugar not plants?? Oversimplifying stuff doesn't make it better...
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go back to your harry potter fan fiction
The truth is, anything but saccharin.
My standard response to that kind of statement is 'Good for you. Have a cookie.'
My standard response is I would like to know more
Trust the overseer to do what's best for you. /s
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